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301. Special Episode: Finding God Beyond Religion- Spiritual Discernment in Everyday Life · GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is God and Autobiography, the podcast, a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book, God and Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Martin.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: To his vast surprise, God answered in words.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: And God had a lot to tell him.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 301.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to God and Autobiography the Podcast.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Scott Langdon, your host.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: What if finding God isn't about finding the right religion, but learning how to pay attention?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Jerry Martin explores theology with what he calls a radically personal approach.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Glimpses of the divine can come through religious traditions, but also through art, music, nature, and experiences of friendship, suffering, contemplation.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe even something another person says at just the right moment.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: The challenge is learning to notice these experiences and discern what may be real from what may simply be our own projection.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: When it comes to our relationship to God and how we talk about God, a new type of theology is emerging.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: A theology without walls.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Here's Jerry to explain.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoy the episode.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Always start with the uh the etymological meaning.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Theology is the logos of theos, the articulate understanding of what we can know or apprehend of the divine or ultimate reality.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I always pause here because there are different kinds of ultimates.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: The boson particle is a kind of ultimate in physics, and various philosophers, uh, Leibniz, monads are ultimate and so forth, but that's not what we're quite interested in.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: We're interested in, so I always think it's important to define what ultimate reality, what divine reality are we looking for, or are we trying to explicate?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I explain it this way: the relevant reality is that which has or ought to have gravitational pull on our lives, that which should ground us and toward which we should orient our lives.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: The purpose of theology is not merely to develop a theory of reality, but a living attunement with it, a life in concert with the divine or ultimate.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: The subject matter of theology is the divine reality, not the religions, not certainly one's own religion.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, as Robert Neville has noted, theology reduces to sociological claims.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is what my group believes.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like any truth-seeking project, theology must take in all available data.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: The world's religions are, among other things, rich sources of what I call aperçues, glimpses of the ultimate world, which manifest itself in revelation, enlightenment, epiphanies and insights.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Valid Aperceues can be found not only in the religious traditions, but in philosophy, literature, depth psychology, social relations, nature, art, music, love and friendship, suffering and struggles with evil, the quiet moments of contemplation, even of despair.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: The epistemological challenge is spiritual discernment.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: The first task is to pay attention, to notice and to recognize the glimmers and tremors of the divine.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: These may come in extraordinary moments of divine presence, or in more subtle signals in the surface of consciousness, or in the depths of our bodies.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: The glimmers may come in religious ceremonies, or as a friend reported, when he's on his dirt bike.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: We live our lives through our bodies, minds, hearts, and situations.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: We are our instruments of spiritual discernment.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: For this task, we need a clarified soul, not burdened by distortions and distractions.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Divine messages, hints, clues, nudges can arrive in many forms, including tasks put in our paths or what may seem like casual remarks from friends, neighbors, or even enemies.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Noticing these moments requires spiritual sensitivity and an open soul.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: The second task is to distinguish genuine aperçues from fantasies, groupthink, ego, projection, and so on, that a particular apercie or insight that lies outside one's own current theological or other commitments is not an adequate reason to discount it as evidence.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: One important aperçue, or kind of aperçue, is receiving a calling.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: The disclosure of one's true vocation, or swadharma, or a summons of love, or of commitment, or even just a momentary demand to rise to a particular challenge.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: The discernment of appers and living in truth in tune with the ultimate requires that we genuinely seek truth.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Once we do our best to achieve an open mind and an open heart, we do better to trust Appers Huse and let them show what they have to teach than to doubt and thereby foreclose further insights.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is why I sometimes speak of an epistemics of trust.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike the epistemological tradition that starts with doubt, epistemics reflects on how knowing actually works.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: We always start with trusting our experience, our memory, our reasoning, and then we correct those in light of other experience, memory and reasoning.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: As we articulate the theological implications of aperçues, we take in, consistency and comprehensiveness are desirable, but not necessary.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Paradoxes and loose ends may allow for a wider range of aperçues and a richer harvest of truth.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: When we do not know how to reconcile apparently contradictory insights, it may be best just to live in dialectical tension.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: That unresolved tension may reveal truths of its own.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody can take in everything.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: That is not what we're called to do.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: In my own radically personal version of theology without walls, the challenge is to find your own best access to the divine or ultimate, and to probe those truths vouchsafed for you, and to follow those paths marked out for you as best you can discern them.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: In the radically personal approach, our theological formulations will not be seen as the one and only truth, but rather as an aspect or dimension of a complex ultimate reality.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: One's own task is to follow with faithful attention the breadcrumbs that mark one's own path.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And, as the Bhagavad Gita recommends, live not the spectacular life assigned to another, but the humble, even errant life that is one's own.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: That is where you will find the divine.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God and Autobiography is Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with episode 44.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God and Autobiography is told to a Philosopher, available now at Amazon.com and always at God and Autobiography.com.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Pick up your own copy today.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions at God and Autobiography dot com and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is Scott Langdon.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see you next time.