20. God Shares His Earliest Interactions In Chinese Spirituality | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher [Part 20]

"I communicate not only with individuals but with peoples, and My instruments of communication include not just words and voices, but institutions, traditions, mores, historical currents and trends, and the like."

Welcome to 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.

Read God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher.

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Transcript

Season Two - Episode Twenty

 GOD: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY - THE PODCAST
 
JLM -       Narrator (Jerry L. Martin) - voiced by Scott Langdon 
 Jerry -     Jerry Martin - voiced by Scott Langdon
 GOD -    The Voice of God - voiced by Jerry L. Martin, who heard the voice

JLM

To find the beginning, I looked for the Chinese Moses or Socrates. But books on China don't start with individual thinkers or religious leaders. They start with "the Chinese mind" or "the Chinese spirit."

JERRY

Lord, I am not finding a founder of Chinese religion.

GOD

Your approach is too individual, too "Protestant." I communicate not only with individuals but with peoples, and My instruments of communication include not just words and voices, but institutions, traditions, mores, historical currents and trends, and the like. The Chinese were collectively very responsive to a coherent set of messages I sent and they guarded them like the household treasure and passed them on from one generation to the next. Individual communication is one part of the story, but not the only part.

Remember, the focus is on My story. I speak to people through their cultures as a voice is through air. I am part of the warp and woof of men's (people's) mental lives. Culture is inspired.

JERRY

And to the Chinese in particular?

GOD

I communicated a holistic, reverential attitude to Nature as a whole, which is the foundation for the idea of harmony with Nature as a guide to conduct and "salvation" (Taoist).

JLM

Nature is capitalized to indicate that what is meant is not nature in the sense of a picnic in the woods or nature as defined by contrasts such as nature versus nurture, nature versus convention, or nature versus human artifacts. Rather it is the overarching Nature that encompasses them all. For the Chinese, Heaven (T' ien) is a level, the highest level, of cosmic Nature. According to the ancient Book of History, "Heaven, working unseen, has decisively made men with certain hidden springs of character, aiding also the harmonious development of it in their various conditions." Virtuous rulers are said to rule with the Mandate of Heaven. Poor rulers forfeit it. The ancient Book of Odes advises, "Always strive to be in harmony with Heaven's Mandate."

JERRY

Lord, am I on the right track?

GOD

Yes, but what you haven't picked up on is the Chinese aestheticizing of Nature, which is both broad and fine-tuned. Look at that poetry. The references to flowers and the like are not the kind of awe and fear that inspired early Greek polytheism, nor a vague holistic wonder at the universe as a whole. It reflects a sense of the expressive side of Nature, which is, of course, My expressiveness through Nature. They were subtle and picked up on that.

JLM

Looking at classic odes, I found that some of them are hymns, used in religious and state ceremonies. Others that arose among the common folk are simple songs, accompanied by a zither, that tell in a direct and honest way about life, love, and loss. The action is often set in nature, sometimes in the sense of Nature as an authoritative context.

JERRY

Lord, what was special about Chinese culture?

GOD

"The Chinese are an unusual people. They resonate to Nature, feel its tones and rhythms, are attuned to it, "hear" it, listen attentively to it, and it "tells" them certain things. They catch its vibrations and try to match their vibrations to it. This is a deep affinity, with spiritual depth. This attunement provides rhythms and determinations (delimitations), divisions like quadrants, mapping orientations, spatial orientation like latitude and longitude, and orderings and a sense of what is fitting to their lives.

This in turn brings inner peace and harmony. This sense of order is something unique in human experience, a unique contribution. And it is a right response to the cosmos. There is a natural rhythm and ordering that is healing for the soul to conform to. It is not like Dike, some sort of divine law or righteousness or duty.

JLM

The Greek idea of Dike meant not transgressing the proper limits, hence justice or right order. This is not the Chinese understanding of that order.

GOD

It is more like joining an instrumental group and fitting in with the harmonies, the patterns. For the Chinese, it is very intuitive, a sensibility, not like the Stoic logos.

JLM

The Stoic logos was a divine rationality that informs the universe and to which the rational soul conforms. For the Chinese, what is needed is not rationality, but a fine-tuned sensibility.

GOD

One of the things I put into the universe, one of the things I am, is the natural order and, like the standard measure (or meter), the prime "tone" or "metronome" or tuning fork. There is a "frequency" then, and I am it. This is one way I make Myself available to men and animals. There is a divine hum to the universe, and that is one way I communicate.

So I "set aside" this whole people and communicate with them very profoundly in this way.

JERRY

And the Chinese were adept at picking up the signal?

GOD

They have both a natural temperament and cultural, linguistic, and symbolic resources that lean them this way, much more than in the West. People cannot take everything in at once. They have to specialize and the Chinese have specialized in this.

JERRY

With little or no sense of a personal God, didn't they lose a lot?

GOD

Everybody loses a lot. No one gets it all in. That is fine. They all help Me realize, express Myself. They are all part of the big story.

JLM

At this point, I was told just to sit with God for a moment. I was led into my inner self. Looking at nature from that vantage point, I saw it aesthetically. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that fiction requires "the willing suspension of disbelief." The aesthetic attitude requires the willing suspension of desire. That allows the order and beauty of nature to reveal itself, uncoerced. That is the difference between art and decoration and, more radically, between the appreciation of nature and seeing it as something to be dismantled for other uses. It is the difference between inflicting ourselves on nature and letting the divine reality show through. The Chinese had let the divine reality show through.

(Music)

JLM

The great teacher of China was Confucius. The story has it that, as a young man, he went through a period of intense meditation on what he should do with his life. He began having recurring dreams about the Duke of Chou, one of the legendary patriarchs of China, the embodiment of wisdom and virtue. 

Confucius believed these dreams were sending him a message. He was to revive the ancient ways and the classics from which they could be learned. This was to be his most enduring legacy. It is a great story, but as I read it, I kept hearing,

GOD

No, not from dreams.

JERRY

Lord, where did Confucius get his inspiration?

GOD

He got it from his sense of fittingness. For him, duty was a kind of fittingness. It was fitting that a son pay appropriate honors to his father.

JLM

This is something the young Confucius, raised by his widowed mother, had managed to do in spite of great difficulties in even locating where his father had been buried.

GOD

It was fitting in an almost literal sense, like putting the square peg in the square hole, or putting each puzzle piece exactly where it goes without forcing it. It is the fittingness of an artisan, a craftsman, who knows, who virtually sees where each piece should go, where the edges need to be smoothed, where the joints need to be fitted together. He saw society in that way and was a craftsman of society. If fathers behaved fittingly toward their sons, and vice versa, and husbands to their wives, and kings to their subjects, and so forth, then all the pieces would fit, without being forced. You can understand his sayings in this light.

You often call the Chinese approach "aesthetic," and that is not wrong. But "aesthetic" means many things, and for Confucius, it means the aesthetics of the master craftsman, writ large. You will have to pray about what it means for Lao-Tzu.

Your approach is too individualistic, focused solely on My communications to individuals. I also shape cultural mentalities. The Chinese had their own mentality, an aesthetic sense of things, and I enhanced that through My communications with many, many Chinese. Their bias provided material that I used to shape a finely tuned aesthetic and spiritual instrument. You see the results, not only in thinkers such as Confucius and Lao-Tzu, but also in Chinese art, architecture, manners, family life, and so on.

JLM

Confucius describes the superior person: "In seeing he is careful to see clearly, in hearing he is careful to hear distinctly, in his looks he is careful to be kindly; in his manner to be respectful, in his words to be loyal, in his work to be diligent."

Proper behavior cannot be achieved by conforming to a general rule. One must pay careful attention to the situation and adjust behavior in the most fitting way, for, in the Confucian version of the Golden Mean, "To go too far is as bad as not to go far enough."

Words should fit deeds, with neither excessive pride nor false modesty. "A gentleman is ashamed to let his words outrun his deeds." And words must fit circumstances. "At home in his native village his manner is simple and unassuming, as though he did not trust himself to speak. But in the ancestral temple and at Court he speaks readily, though always choosing his words with care. . . . [W]hen conversing with the Under Ministers his attitude is friendly and affable; when conversing with the Upper Ministers, it is restrained and formal. When the ruler is present it is wary, but not cramped."

What to say, or whether to speak at all, depends on what words, or silences, are fitting to the person and the situation. "Not to talk [about the Way] to one who could be talked to, is to waste a man. To talk to those who cannot be talked to, is to waste one's words."

Confucius presented one version of the Way. There was another, presented by his older contemporary, Lao-Tzu.

(Music)

(Chp. 24)

JLM

The great work in the Taoist tradition is the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way and the Power. At first, I thought this would be the place to begin my Chinese studies but was warned,

GOD

Don't assume that every text enshrined in the history of religion is an authentic or pure communication from Me. The Taoism of Lao-Tzu reflects a great deal his own personality--shy, reticent, unassuming. I communicated a grain of truth to him. The rest is his own invention or elaboration. Find that grain of truth, or read him and the others (other Taoist texts) and pray to get My guidance in finding it. Read widely in Taoism. Do not assume that Lao-Tzu is the only worthwhile source, and do connect Taoism with the previous Chinese tradition.

JLM

I did read more broadly, and this is what I learned. Confucius had taught the rules of behavior appropriate to various social roles. Lao-Tzu was less interested in the ways of the world and more interested in the Way, the Tao, that lies beyond language and reason. The two men are said to have been contemporaries, living around the fifth or sixth century b.c.e., about the same time as Socrates. Writing a few centuries later, the great historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, the Tacitus of ancient China, reports that the two sages met in the capital of Loyang, where Lao-Tzu, the older of the two, was curator of the royal library. Lao-Tzu told Confucius:

The men about whom you talk [the wise rulers venerated in the classics] are dead, and their bones are mouldered to dust; only their words are left. Moreover, when the superior man gets his opportunity, he mounts aloft; but when the time is against him, he is carried along by the force of circumstances. [The outcome depends, not on his will or talent or moral cultivation, but on whether he is attuned to the flow of the situation.] I have heard that a good merchant, though he have rich treasures safely stored, appears as if he were poor; and that the superior man, though his virtue be complete, is yet to outward seeming stupid. [Those in touch with the Way have no need or desire to flaunt their wealth or virtue.] Put away your proud air and many desires, your insinuating habit and wild will. They are no advantage to you--this is all I have to tell you.

"After the meeting, Confucius is supposed to have said:

I know how birds can fly, fishes swim, and animals run. But the runner may be snared, the swimmer hooked, and the flyer shot by the arrow. But there is the dragon: I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds, and rises to heaven. Today I have seen Lao-Tzu, and can only compare him to the dragon.

The historian adds his own epigraph.

"Lao-Tzu cultivated the Tao and its attributes, the chief aim of his studies being how to keep himself concealed and remain unknown. He continued to reside at the capitol of Chou, but after a long time, seeing the decay of the dynasty, he left it and went away to the barrier-gate, leading out of the kingdom on the northwest. Yin His, the warden of the gate, said to him, "You are about to withdraw yourself out of sight. Let me insist on your (first) composing for me a book." On this, Lao-Tzu wrote a book in two parts, setting forth his views on the Tao and its attributes, in more than 5000 characters. He then went away, and it is not known where he died. He was a superior man, who liked to keep himself unknown.

Ching means not just a book, but the Book, an authoritative classic or canon. The character Tao is composed of the characters for "moving on" and "head," hence, "going ahead." The original meaning was "way" with the connotations of both path and method. In this respect, it is similar to the Greek hodos, originally meaning "path," from which we derive the term method (meta-hodos, "according to the path"). As method, the Tao also suggests such ideas as principle, rationality, or reason, hence the right way or truth, and finally rational speech or word. In this respect, it resembles the Greek logos, which means both "word," as in the opening of the Gospel of John ("In the beginning was the Word"), and "reason," which we retain in such words as logic and sociological, reasoning about society.

But etymological analysis is not dispositive when one comes to interpreting the Tao Te Ching. Take the famous opening line, usually translated as, "The Way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way." I am told that, in Chinese, the line has only three characters, the last with a negative indicator, each of which means Tao. Literally, it looks like: Tao Tao not-Tao, which suggests that the Tao that is Tao-ed is not the Tao. Another translation captures the repetition: "The Reason that can be reasoned is not the eternal Reason." The "can be" is interpretive, since there are no modals in Chinese, and no tenses. Alan Watts suggests that the element that expresses "going" and forms part of the character for Tao also has the connotation of rhythm. Hence the Tao could be understood as intelligent rhythm, the rational pulse of the universe. I remembered that God had described Himself as the divine metronome.

Whatever the best translation, the Tao is elusive and clothed in paradox. Whatever can be said must be said with a certain assertorial lightness. What can we say about it?

First, the Way does not seem to be a Creator standing over or outside the world. For example (from the English translation by Alan Watts):

"All things depend upon it to exist,

and it does not abandon them.

To its accomplishments it lays no claim.

It loves and nourishes all things,

but does not lord it over them."

But there is a kind of creation story, which has some resemblance to what I have received about God "before" Creation.

"There is something obscure which is complete

before heaven and earth arose;

tranquil, quiet,

standing alone without change,

moving around without peril.

It could be the mother of everything.

I don't know its name,

and call it Tao."

The Tao provides everything without having to do anything: "The Tao does nothing, but nothing is left undone."

What about the other key term, Te? In Confucius, Te is virtue, character, or moral force, and requires moral cultivation. For the Taoists, it is virtue in a gentler sense. Lao-Tzu's great successor, Chaungtse, writes:

"When water is still, it is like a mirror, reflecting the beard and the eyebrows. It gives the accuracy of the water-level, and the philosopher makes it his model. And if water thus derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind? The mind of the Sage being in repose becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all existence.

The fluidity of water is not the result of any effort on the part of the water, but is its natural property. And the virtue of the perfect man is such that even without cultivation there is nothing which can withdraw from his sway. Heaven is naturally high, the earth is naturally solid, the sun and moon are naturally bright. Do they cultivate these attributes?"

(Music)

(The End)