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

230. What's On Our Mind- God’s Other Side: Zoroaster, Divine Duality, and Becoming

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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In the newest What's On Your Mind, host Scott Langdon sits down with Dr. Jerry L. Martin for a deep and heartfelt conversation about divine growth, spiritual tension, and the unfolding mystery of God's nature.

As they revisit God's revelation to the ancient prophet Zoroaster, the discussion opens with Jerry’s experience of spiritual anxiety, and how his body reacted to the unknown before divine communication began. This leads into a powerful exploration of how God Himself describes being not all-powerful, not all-knowing, and not all-good; at least not in the absolute sense. Instead, God is growing, evolving, and seeking fullness through relationship, through the world, and through us.

Through Zoroaster’s divine encounter, God comes to see His “other side.” A concept that challenges traditional theology but resonates deeply with those who see spirituality as a journey, not a fixed set of beliefs. Scott and Jerry explore themes like duality, good and evil, panentheism, and the reality of imperfection in divine creation.

Drawing from metaphors in music, embodiment, and human love, the conversation touches on Beethoven, spiritual embodiment, and how meaning is co-created through lived experience. This episode will speak to anyone curious about the divine, questioning inherited beliefs, or wondering if God can grow with us.

 📖 If you’ve ever wondered whether God is still becoming, or how direct experience with the divine might feel, this episode offers deep reflection for spiritual seekers on the path. 

🎧 Subscribe to hear more conversations that expand the boundaries of belief.

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 want to hear from you! 

Questions or reflections? 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. 

Scott Langdon 01:14: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and this week I join Jerry Martin for What's On Our Mind. In this episode, our conversation centers around God's explanation of his encounter with Zoroaster, who saw and articulated the idea of God having two sides. Also, Jerry and I talk about Jerry's anxiety at this point in his journey with God and how he realized the God he had been agnostic about, was not what God was like at all.

Scott Langdon 01:43: Thanks for joining us this week for What's On Our Mind. We love knowing you're out there and that's why we continue to be here. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back, my friends. We have another edition of What's On Our Mind this week. I'm Scott Langdon, of course, and of course I'm here with Jerry Martin. How are you today, Jerry?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:12: Well, very good to see you and very good to be talking to you about some very interesting things, I think, coming up with the previous programs that we've done.

Scott Langdon 02:24: Yes, we're focusing around episode 26. This is the Zoroaster encounter. God and Zoroaster, and God is telling you about this and explaining how that encounter with Zoroaster had God considering now God's other side. And that was some tricky information to get and to ponder and to talk about God with. And I wanted to talk to you before we get into the sort of real details and sort of dig into that encounter, the beginning of episode 26, what it opens with is you explaining how things were happening before you and God started to talk about this subject. And so the very first, the opening of the episode is me as the narrator, so as you telling the audience.

Scott Langdon 03:18: You say this. You say. “Today, even before praying, I felt anxiety rising, an agitated foreboding. I told myself avoid surprises, just review the route already taken.” And then you ask God a question which we'll get into, and He gets into an answer. But I'm wondering about that opening line. I've always kind of thought of it maybe as a throwaway, but as we just talked before we came on here on the air here looking at it again, it was important to start with that. So, I'm wondering about the physicality, the anxiety. What was that telling you? Were you avoiding something that you thought might be coming, an answer that God might give, or you didn't know, it's the anxiety of the unknown? What was going on there?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:04: Well, you know, over and over in God: An Autobiography I'm told things that shock me from very, very early. I am an evolving God. What? This made no sense to me whatsoever. And there it was. And then it would crop up again and again and that was one of many, many things and somehow on this particular day I felt I'm not up for more shocking things. You know, somehow I was wary and is something going to be upsetting here and therefore I kind of tell myself what is it- kind of retrace the previous steps, just kind of hang on to the journey so far and don't worry, you know, look back at the path, okay, we've gotten here safely, and just hang on to that and kind of hope for the best.

Scott Langdon 04:58: It's interesting that when I was looking at that line and I was considering, I was wondering, hmm, what was going on with you, I started to consider that when I'm about to have a conversation with someone that I'm doing what Jim Carrey, the actor Jim Carrey, talks about and I think I don't know if you borrowed this verbiage from someone else, but he calls it future traveling where in your mind you know you're thinking of all of these things that could happen. And of course, it's only thoughts in your mind.

Scott Langdon 05:30: But anytime I have this sort of fear or anxiety kind of pop up, I feel it in my body, I can feel my thoughts racing, I can think and sometimes, you know, I have to say, when you are often, let me say it this way, often folks who have racing thoughts or that kind of thing are often in the creative arts, the creative space, and what, what is happening, it's just that creative part of your brain is just fired up with all of these situations and things and scenarios that could happen. And I'm curious what you think about the physical connection to a spiritual experience, and what I mean by that is when folks start to feel this way, this anxiety, this fear popping up, and so they say, okay, I want to investigate what that is. This chapter seems to be a lot about that self-inquiry. God is wondering about God's other side. Well, this seems to be something that comes from our other side, this anxiety. It doesn't seem natural, so we want to investigate it. Where do we start with that?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:47: Well, on the body side, I'm told somewhere, “That's also My voice,” God says, kind of listen, listen to your body, pay attention, because that's telling you something. And we are psychophysical beings. You know, God enters a world, you might say, in God: An Autobiography, He's creating the world and thereby entering the world. And God becomes embodied in this world with us, and we're part of the embodiment of God, and that's part of the complexity of the story. But you have to pay attention to all those things. And there was another part to your thought, Scott, that I'm now missing.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:36: But anyway, you say more than just we're embodied, but you were relating it to creative moments, that moments of unsettlement may well be moments of where you're available for inspiration, some new thought may be coming in that's not entirely comfortable. Can you imagine? You had a beautiful Newtonian world where everything made sense, equal and opposite reactions and so forth. And now Einstein, oh my God, curved space, speed of light, you know, E=MC2. You'd think there must have been a moment where he's very unsettled because he hasn't figured it all out yet and yet he's saying something isn't right with the Newtonian view.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:24: Well, this happens in all parts of our life. I know somebody who had just asked a girl to marry him. No, it was the woman reporting she had just been asked to marry this guy, had accepted. When next week she meets her true love, well, can you imagine the unsettlement in a moment like that? So we have to cherish the moments of unsettlement, not just the moments of settlement. You know every plot that you enact, Scott. There's tension and resolution, pieces of music, tension, dissonance and resolution, and well, that's the drama you know. So the moments of tension are productive and you don't get to the resolution without them.

Scott Langdon 09:15: You start out with a question in this next conversation with God. In this conversation, you say maybe I should start with Your message and then go over Your personal development, and right away God answers and says no, they can't be separated in that way. And that was really intriguing to me, that God's message, what He's trying to get across, and I want you to tell My story. Okay, so let me talk about Your story and separately from your personal development. Well, no, we can't do that. They're connected and I think you referred to it a little bit earlier. When God creates the world, God enters the world in a sense. So, in other words, as soon as there's a creation, now there's a creator and a creation, now there's a duality in practice they arise together.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:03: They arise together.

Scott Langdon 10:07: So with Zoroaster, the interaction between Zoroaster and Me, God says, “was a growth experience for Me, as well as for him and humankind. I came to see My other side more clearly.” So in what sense? Well, let me ask it this way: what was Zoroaster's function? What could God not do without Zoroaster?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:37: Well, that's an interesting question and a hard question. What God could not do was almost to admit to God, God's own incompleteness. I know the first time that I somehow alluded to this I was having some feeling of God, as in a kind of suffering, divine suffering, and the suffering from having botched the job. You might say a kind of vaguely guilty suffering, something like that. And I ask about it, and God's response was almost as if oh, you've caught me out, you've seen through me, and nobody likes that moment. You may be feeling guilty and think you're right to feel guilty. You did something wrong, but that doesn't mean you want somebody to come along and point this out to you. And so one thing you might say that's just coming to me, I don't know if it fits with the whole narrative here, but God has to be found out, God has to be found out, and so He says Zoroaster probably overdid it with the good God and the evil God, the evil, twin God. Okay, that splits good and evil too far apart. You might say they're in a blend in the world, in God and in you and me. But this enabled God to sort of see it sharply, and that's a step forward, as it is for any of us. You realize this happens sometimes. It happens in a marriage, oh God, it's true.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:20: Somebody points out, maybe a friend. You're talking about your marriage and a friend said well, you know, you really haven't been fair to her about such and such. Oh God, I think you're right. I'm embarrassed to say it, but this is a growth experience and probably going to help you make a better marriage. Well, God is going through growth experiences and we are too with God, often in interaction with God. I mean that's just not that just God is developing off where God is and we're developing off where we are, but we're developing in interaction with each other. And that kind of revelation to Zoroaster. Zoroaster, he says I wasn't trying to show this to Zoroaster. I was just being Me, God says. But Zoroaster picked up on this and it came to him in this rather dramatic form of a good God, evil God.

Scott Langdon 13:15: It sounds a lot like when someone points something out to you and we've talked about this before in a different way, I think when we say, like um, somebody says something funny yes and and somebody says, oh, you're a real comedian.

Scott Langdon 13:33: And you think, oh yeah, I guess I am, you know, like I must be. Then you know, in that sense it takes someone from the outside to see you in a way that you can't possibly see yourself, because you know you can't see your own eyes obviously, right, you're from this perspective. So someone else from that perspective, looking back at you, gives you information that you couldn't possibly have. So to have that kind of scenario, to have God participate in that kind of scenario, is a bit mind-blowing. 

Scott Langdon 14:07: For God to say it took another side of me to, which would be Zoroaster in this sense, another to look back on me as myself and point this out. And then said, oh yes, that's how you could articulate it: A twin, evil twin. Okay, yeah, like when somebody might say to me oh, you know, you're a lot like this thing or this, whatever, and I go, oh well, let me see that. Okay, yeah, I can see that that is an aspect of me that you could pick up on, knowing how we are with each other. I can see how you could see that you know you're a real teacher. Well, somebody who's maybe older than me and we don't have that relationship wouldn't talk to me that way. But a student of mine, who has known me as my student, would say oh, you're a real teacher, right. So these different aspects, but it's really interesting that God would have that experience.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:10: Yeah, very mind-boggling to me, and I guess that's why, at the beginning of this episode, I'm worried what on earth is going to come up today? Well, it's going to be we're talking about Zoroaster and God's good side and evil side. And I kept saying I thought before I was an agnostic, didn't believe in God, but I thought I had a correct definition of God. You know, if there was a God like I don't believe in unicorns, but I know what a unicorn is. But it turns out I don't know what God is.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:43: I thought I did, but God has aspects that are contradictory to the idea of God I grew up with. I mean, where did I get my idea of God? It's just from my upbringing culture and God is turning that upside—not upside down. It's not that God is the evil God of the universe or anything. That's not, you might say, the dominant aspect of God. God is mainly the good God, pointing us forward and leading Himself forward and us forward. But through this rough world that we live in and where we all have this mixed nature, including God.

Scott Langdon 17:00: So when God tells you that experience between Zoroaster and me was a growth experience for Me as well as for him and humankind, I came to see My other side more clearly. And then you say, okay, H other side, take a deep breath, keep walking right. So what is this other side? And God answers and says this. He says I am limited and incomplete, in a sense, not all powerful, in a sense not all knowing, in a sense not all good. I am searching for my own fullness and since I am also the world, the totality of I, the world, humanity, are all seeking fullness together, in partnership. So in this explanation that God gives you, we now see God as a subject, God giving you a subjective point of view.

Scott Langdon 17:57: I am not all powerful, but sometimes powerful, but not all powerful, but sometimes powerful, but not all powerful. You know, all of these are there’s God as a subject, which means He's one thing and another two. God says all things, God is the totality of everything, and so it's this panentheism right. Everything or all is in God. So God contains everything and within God, God is, you could say, playing all of the roles, like we've talked about before, that there is this what motivates it, let's say, seems to be God's exploration of fullness. So, in other words, God, as just before creation, doesn't have any ability to understand fullness until there is otherness. Is that what he's saying to you there?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:03: Yeah, that's exactly right. Before creation. You know, there is a glimpse of what God was like before creation and it was sort of ideal, placid, nothing going on, not even time yet in a sense, and kind of unreal. And that's very much like the story Zoroaster gives us. Everybody is up in an ideal realm that is, in its own way, perfect. There's no suffering there, no conflict of good and evil or anything like that. It's just and maybe no change, maybe no events, no actions, but just being in this kind of ideal state.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:55: The problem with the ideal state is it's not real and it's like almost like somebody's got the design of the perfect car you know the blueprints or whatever you call it for a car, but never makes a car. The car isn't perfect because there is no car. You know it's just a blueprint. And probably we have lots of wonderful ideas like that in our heads. We can imagine the ideal world. Okay, and we might think we have our own philosophy as the ideal philosophy and if you get really carried away you think you yourself are the ideal.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:37: But wait a minute, the ideal is not actually real and God attacks here, critiques the whole idea of perfection. You know that everything's got to be perfect, that it's no good to know a lot, you've got to know everything. It's no good to be able to do some things, you've got to be able to do everything, including you know these logical paradoxes. Can God lift the unliftable? Can God create the unliftable stone that even He can't lift, you know. So you get these odd paradoxes, and God's not all good. You'd think that would be possible, but not in a real world. A world, for example, where people are different and they do have agency. They take actions and they get sick, and the actions are unpredictable. And so you think you're helping out and you're actually making a terrible mistake.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:35: I remember seeing in school days a guy playing football. You know we were all out playing football and a good friend of mine grabbed the ball, ran for a touchdown, but at the wrong pole, and I remember the look in his face of determination. You know as he plowed forward and everyone's watching, they're yelling, but he's not hearing anything. He's plowing forward to touch down for the other side. But anyway, this is a life in which there is conflict, turmoil, imperfection, and those are all traits of the real and the way to actually develop yourself, to evolve. God says He's looking for His own fulfillment, world, us, humanity, all looking for our own fulfillment. It's got to be a fulfillment in a real world, with real challenges that are then overcome.

Scott Langdon 22:33: God says to you, in response to your question I don't understand why it's necessary to create a world at all if it entails such suffering. And He goes into basically the explanation that you were just giving, that holiness unto itself is nothing, and I don't know if this is just semantical or well, I guess it is, isn't it? It's the idea, but breaking down that word, nothing. Say it a little differently: no thing. Holiness is no thing. And if there's no thing, it's just what we were talking about the actualization that there's a car blueprint but no car.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:14: Yes.

Scott Langdon 23:15: And it's interesting because that is something that we have in common with God then because we have what you just said lots of plans in our head. I have this whole plan of what this show that I'm working on, this solo show that I'm working on, is going to be, like what the audiences are going to think, how it's going to, all the work it's going to take, who I want to maybe hire and help. I have all of these plans and if I don't do the work, as Abigail said, God can't mail a letter, right. But if I don't do the study, if I don't contact the people, if I don't do the work, then it's just in there and I get frustrated, feeling like, oh, I'm not doing what I should be doing. I wonder, could God be feeling that similar way?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:05 Well, there must be ways like that. Certainly, if you read the Hebrew Testament, the Old Testament, God is at his wit's end at various points, I was told by God, and this was not accurate. This was a part of the Old Testament that was not accurate but that God actually regretted creating the world, and of course we know the story of the flood and so forth. But, oh my gosh, it didn't pan out as God imagined, you know, and as if God's self didn't yet realize the challenges of being embodied beings inhabiting a world. You know being organic, falling in love, you know having disappointment in love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:56: The Cain and Abel story, two brothers, but one's gift is accepted, one's gift is not accepted. And so what does he do? Not try to make a better gift, but just go kill his rival. That's familiar from sibling rivalry and so forth. We envy each other, we congratulate our friend on success, at the same point that we feel well, why couldn't I have had that success? You know, this is our complex human nature as organic, active beings in a world, in the rocky terrain of Earth, and that's where development happens. And so you can't… At one point I'm asking, I guess in the back and forth with God on this topic. God is saying you know, the composer thinks of the Fifth Symphony and it's perfect in his head. Why does he want an orchestra to play it? That will be less good than the perfect symphony in Beethoven's head. But it's not quite actual, it's just in his head. You know he's got the score okay, but it's got to be played. It's got to be played and life has to be played or it's nothing.

Scott Langdon 26:17: That's interesting, and let's stay with Beethoven for a minute, because his Ninth Symphony with the chorus in the last movement. According to the things I've read and some movies I've seen about him, he never did hear that. See how important interaction, human interaction, is. He's got this in his head, he writes it all down, he has it, the parts you know for each instrument and so forth. We get choir, gets all rehearsed, we get to that moment of the performance and he can't hear that. But he can certainly feel it. He's. He's deaf, correct, he is deaf. Beethoven is almost entirely deaf. At this point. His hearing got progressively. Yeah, so by this point in his life he was really not hearing anything.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:08: So he sits at the concert, right, but can't hear it, right. But you're saying, well, yeah, but he can kind of feel it, he can sort of see it.

Scott Langdon 27:14: So he can feel it in a vibrational sense that you might be able to measured. But there's also this other vibrational sense that can't be measured, which is all of the times that each individual instrumentalist put into practicing, and the conductor to the score, and now in the choir, rehearsing, and the people wherever they were, gathering, into this all space, this one space right now. And here we are for the performance. And in that space, what's going on now is Beethoven's work, but it's no longer Beethoven's work now, it's everyone in that space's work. And that is just take a step back and see what God is playing at now. A deaf man, a flautist, a conductor, a violinist, a person in the audience, everyone is in this space now, in this collective participation in this actualization of Beethoven's Ninth. Now it's no longer a blueprint, it is happening in the world, and the happening of it seems to be the point.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:38: Yeah, the happening of it, and it's also a public event and a cultural artifact isn't quite the right word, but it's a cultural expression also. So we all own Beethoven's Ninth. We can listen to it again. If we take music appreciation course, we'll appreciate it, even in a deeper way than you do if you're listening to it naively. But it belongs to us all and it's an actualized work. It doesn't have to be perfect. There's no idea that the ninth is necessarily better than the seventh or fifth. You know, that's not what it's about. It is what it is and it's actualized and brought to life by everyone working so very hard in those unglamorous environments in which people, musicians, practice their instruments and then they bring this glorious event to take place.

Scott Langdon 29:37: One of my traditions, personal traditions I have around Christmas time is I will pick a day in my schedule that it'll fit and I will put in my headphones and turn on my music and I will play a complete recording of Handel's Messiah from note one to note end and usually walk around town and I'll listen to the whole thing in one sitting. And every year I try to listen to a new version and at first I was like I want to try to find the best version of this, find the right tempos that I like, and did it. What's the best version? And the more. If you go to Apple music and put in Handel's Messiah, there are just dozens and dozens and dozens of recordings right, and you can go to any live recording during Christmas. You can find one right.

Scott Langdon 30:24: But the last few years I've really settled on, I want to take in this experience these particular singers, these particular players, this particular conductor and his or her tempos and their scholarship in it. And what has blown me away when I think about it like that, is that wherever they were when they recorded that, however many years ago and every year it gets a year later right. Wherever they were, they are now full participants. Whatever it is of them, their spirit, there's, I don't know what do we call it? I call it God. They are now full participants in my present experience as I'm listening to that and when my soul is moved by their artistry. And who are they playing? They're playing work by a man who's been dead for almost 300 years, right? That's amazing to me. So the actualization of it does something. Hearing the music changes you, it moves you and you're different when you're done.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:31: Yeah and something else you're bringing out is, each version of it is itself another work, you might say, with another set of meanings resonating out of that work. It's particularly obvious in interpretations of plays that the different actors or the director has a conception and they're bringing a different conception to life and the world is an awful lot like that and our lives are an awful lot like that. It's part of the point about there's a tremendous attraction to unity and isn't it wonderful that we're all alike, or something,  drops of water in the sea, but it's also quite wonderful that we're not alike and that diversity enables different meanings to come out of even the same score, or the same script has different meanings.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:33: And each person, actor, and as you say Scott, each member of the audience, because they're drawing from it what they can draw, what makes sense to them in terms of their whole life, set of challenges, beliefs, etc. And that's part of… God: An Autobiography talks about this in the world's religions, each one bringing out a different side of the divine and of the human-divine interaction. Well, and that's what we're doing with each other in daily life, at every moment that we interact, at breakfast or saying hello to your friend. You're enacting the difference as well as the unity.

Scott Langdon 33:25: 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.