272. What’s On Our Mind- You Are the Experience God Is Having: On Consciousness and the Divine

In Episode 272 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Jerry Martin and Scott Langdon ask a deceptively simple question: What is experience?

Is it just a stream of sensations passing through us — or is it the unfolding of meaning across a lifetime? When we look back at our lives, do we merely remember events, or do we discover layers of significance we couldn’t see before?

Drawing from Scott’s recent What’s Your Spiritual Story episode and Jerry’s Radically Personal series, the conversation turns to the radical uniqueness of every human life. No one has ever been duplicated. Every consciousness is singular. What might it mean, then, to say: “You are the experience God is having”?

Through reflections on theater, personal memory, Jane Austen’s Emma, the play Proof, and the philosophical idea of “thisness” (haecceitas), Jerry and Scott explore whether awareness itself is the meeting point between the human and the divine.

Experience changes us. Meaning deepens. And perhaps consciousness is not merely personal — but participatory in something far greater.

As you listen, consider your own experience. Where has meaning deepened for you? And what might it reveal about the divine presence within your life?

Related Episodes:

270. Recovering the Depth of Experience in a Flattened World- Radically Personal

271. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Scott’s Journey from Certainty to Love

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Transcript

Scott  Langdon [ 00:00:17,220 ]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 [ 00:00:58,920 ] Episode 272: Hello, and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, and Jerry Martin and I return this week for our series, What's On Our Mind. On this week's episode, Jerry and I talk about experience, what it means in terms of our connection to God, and how being aware of our experiences and taking them in can ground us in our partnership with the divine.

Scott Langdon [00:02:11,640] Welcome back, everyone, to another edition of What's On Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon, and I'm with Jerry Martin, and we are here doing this for the 43rd time. I don't know why that seemed relevant. I just happened to realize as I was going through things that this is the 43rd time we've done this. And it's not weekly. So we've been doing this for a long time, which is really neat.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:02:34,370]: Yeah, it's almost monthly.

Scott Langdon [00:02:36,240]: Yeah. But I always enjoy it because when we go through what I call a unit of episodes From God To Jerry To You, Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, right now the Radically Personal series that you've done, which is a limited series, and then the What's Your Spiritual Story series that we do, and then we come to this, What's On Our Mind. And that's been one of the anchors of what we do here. And as we explore, it comes back sometimes to you and me talking about these things. And that gives me a lot of joy to be able to explore some of these questions and things that come up in my mind as I work through a unit and work with you and Abigail and the whole team on this podcast.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:29,570]: And we did your spiritual story this past unit, as you call it.

Scott Langdon [00:03:35,460]: It will air just before this episode airs.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:38,300]: I'm glad I mentioned it. That's right. Because it's very interesting. These spiritual stories I find fascinating. And I'm glad we finally got to yours, told as a story, not just bits and pieces of comment about topics, but told as a story, where you started out and so on.

Scott Langdon [00:03:56,710]: So, yeah, last week's episode. I say in the introduction I wasn't sure if I could offer anything new. I feel like people have heard my story before, and you interviewed me earlier on, and I interviewed you, and we interviewed everyone.

Scott Langdon [00:04:12,720]: There is something different this time about sort of going back and really retracing the experiences of my spiritual journey.

Scott Langdon [00:04:23,950]: Thinking back and not only just remembering, as in sort of these are the facts, ma'am, if I were on a stand in a courtroom, did this happen, that happened. It's deeper than that.

Scott Langdon [00:04:39,820]: Looking back at times when here's a real pivotal moment, something I made a decision about, or somebody else had made a decision and I found myself in a difficult time or then a time of triumph or excitement, pivotal moments.

Scott Langdon [00:05:01,160]: And those are experiences that we go back to.

Scott Langdon [00:05:05,640]: And we realize that the experiences that we have are the way that we are involved, or as you say, encounter the world.

Scott Langdon [00:05:16,180]: And I was really interested in this Radically Personal episode. So it was episode number 270, Radically Personal, the fourth episode of this limited series. And you talk about experience. And you talk about if we're going to look at all of the religions and see what they have to offer and take them in and sort through them, we have to take experience seriously. And if we're going to take experience seriously, then we need to understand what experience is, what it does, what it offers us. What is experience?

Scott Langdon [00:05:52,730]: When I went through my spiritual story, that seemed to really be what I was doing, articulating my experience.

Scott Langdon [00:06:02,910]: And experience, it's just so important. Can you talk a little bit about experience and why you find it so important?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:06:08,510]: You're talking about it in the context of your own life story. One of the things that happens when you go back and revisit these moments in the continuity of your life, at a later point in life looking back, is that one of the things experience has that the empiricist model often leaves out is that it just treats little blips of experience, momentary moments of consciousness.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:06:36,170]: But experience also has meanings.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:06:39,490]: While the facts don't change as you get older, as you go on in life, the meaning often does. Or I should put it that other levels of meaning come to life in retrospect, as part of the story. Because these aren't just separated little digital moments. They are unfolding. They're a person's life unfolding.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:07:06,900]: And since it continues unfolding after a point you're going back to in memory, you're now understanding more about that earlier moment. And so experience includes the meanings of experience because they're right there. They aren't just superimposed. They can be. But they're often inhabiting the experience itself.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:07:34,490]: So you draw out those meanings. That's one of the things you're doing when you revisit experience.

Scott Langdon [00:07:41,090]: Hmm. There's a parallel.

Scott Langdon [00:07:44,070]: Or maybe it is this idea, actually, in a type of practice, which is as an actor, I think I've had a similar experience of this type, which is when I was in college, I played Cervantes, Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha, the musical. So I was 18.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:08:03,140]: Amazing.

Scott Langdon [00:08:03,920]: And then 36 years after that.

Scott Langdon [00:08:08,440]: Thank you. I played him again.

Scott Langdon [00:08:11,280]: So now with all of this life experience in between. So it's interesting because in college, he has a line, Cervantes has a line, he says, “I've lived almost 50 years.”

Scott Langdon [00:08:24,830]: So he's not quite 50 years old at the time. Now, I was 54 when I played him at Delaware Theatre Company. And when I said that line, it meant something different, like this person Cervantes — I'm actually older than he is. Interesting. Wow. Time's a funny thing. But I thought the fullness of understanding that I'm bringing to him now.

Scott Langdon [00:08:56,500]: There's no way I could have done that at 18.

Scott Langdon [00:09:01,850]: I did whatever I did and people were pleased and it seemed to be a good show. You did well. But I just can't imagine what I was doing with the character then.

Scott Langdon [00:09:15,280]: Because it's just revisiting, as you said, it's almost like revisiting an experience the way you talked about it, playing this role. It's like the lines are exactly the same. I'm not saying any dialogue that's different. The music is the same. It's in the same key. All of that's the same. But somehow the inhabiting of it again with a fuller breadth of experience from my own life.

Scott Langdon [00:09:41,220]: makes it deeper, somehow more true.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:09:44,700]: Sure. The 18-year-old, even if the 18-year-old is very talented as a young actor, just can't inhabit those lines. Can enact it, but can't inhabit.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:10:01,540]: The sense of being, “Oh, I've lived almost 50 years now.” And I know at my point in life, we all know that life doesn't go on forever. But you get into your 80s, as I am, well, that has a different meaning than it had when I was 18 or 30 or even 50. The clock is running and the sands of the hourglass are running. So these things, you do live different moments.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:10:35,000]: And they have their own fullness, and things that you could understand but didn't resonate with your whole being at an earlier point in life now do.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:10:52,250]: Like your later Cervantes. You can inhabit those lines fully, not just as an actor, but you know what that's like from the inside.

Scott Langdon [00:11:09,760]: Yeah, the character is saying, I've seen some things in my life. And at 18, I hadn't really seen many things compared to him. Now, there are some 18-year-olds who have seen a lot of horrible things or have seen a lot of hardship. And that kind of goes to the two types of experience that I want to talk about today. The one is this sort of personal experience. So Scott being Scott, Jerry being Jerry, and you have the individual experiences of our lives, of our individual lives, of our characters I would call them.

Scott Langdon [00:11:53,710]: And so somebody who's 18, who's lived in a war-torn country and seen people die before their eyes and all of this, and then perhaps another more privileged teenager who grows up with a lot of money and can go to the private schools, or maybe a teenager who grows up remotely in Wyoming on a farm somewhere and doesn't have the kind of socialization that somebody who grows up in New York City would have, let's say. All of these are examples of this individual experience of the world.

Scott Langdon [00:12:53,390]: Then there's the other sort of way I'm thinking of it, which is this collective thought, a collective experience that we have and know. And we can talk about that more in a minute and put a pin in that for now. But the idea of the individual experience of the world.

Scott Langdon [00:13:01,490]: Why is that important that we are so individual like this?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:13:07,210]: Well, I don't know. Why are you making this distinction? What is striking you, Scott?

Scott Langdon [00:13:15,839]: Well, one of the things that was, and we didn't talk about this in my spiritual story, but one of the really important awakenings, I guess.

Scott Langdon [00:13:18,170]: I don't know how to talk about when something came to me, an idea, whatever it is, but I was thinking that no one has ever, no one's ever been duplicated in the entire history of humankind.

Scott Langdon [00:13:32,190]: Everyone is completely unique. Everyone who's come before, everyone who is living now, everyone who will live in the future is completely unique.

Scott Langdon [00:13:40,530]: That blows my mind. That in and of itself is a miracle enough for me to just say, I believe in God. And by God, I mean the complete mystery of this existence. That's incredibly fascinating to me. So from God's point of view, I guess what my question would be would be, why so many of us? We keep going, we keep going, we keep going. It's an endless thing.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:14:13,380]: And yet without duplication. We now have many more billions of people on the earth than we used to. I think I read once there are more people living now than have previously lived in the whole history of mankind, and that's because of the population growth. There was a time that the whole world contained a few hundred thousand people, after all. And now we're all over the place. And yet, as you say, Scott, each new life, no matter how many, and there could be a trillion people, each one is going to be different, and not just different, but different in the significant sense that they have their own drama. I often think of it as a drama to play out their own spiritual story, their own spiritual quest, as well as, of course, other challenges that they have, what to do with their lives, what to do with whether they have love in their life or loss in their life or tragedy in their life, all of that. Those elements that make up the meaning of life.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:15:15,460]: The meaning of life isn't just the nice points. It's all the points that happen, that are part of the meaning of one's life, and yet each of those billion people has their own meaning, their own unfolding of life.

Scott Langdon [00:15:33,320]: As we go through and each one of us tells our own spiritual story, the reflection, the idea of going through our lives like I did for my spiritual story that we recorded, doing that.

Scott Langdon [00:15:49,380]: Tracing that back.

Scott Langdon [00:15:52,070]: Is part of how we recognize that God is with us. Because when I was doing that, when I was reflecting, I was coming at it from this perspective, almost when we say, I'm going to work on myself. Well, who is the I and who's the self that's getting worked on? It's something I mentioned before. Well, with that idea in mind, as I was reflecting on the changes.

Scott Langdon [00:16:27,370]: Of Scott Langdon. So there are many of these things along the journey that changed, including my physical body. My hair, my beard is now gray. I have less hair on my head. Physically, my skin is wrinkled, all of these other things. But then also my perspective on the world, how I view other people, the things I take time for now have changed. But.

Scott Langdon [00:16:56,870]: The perspective from which I am aware that I'm having all of these experiences has not changed.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:17:06,010]: Mmm.

Scott Langdon [00:17:08,260]: So I heard, and I can't remember who said it, where I heard it from, the question was, what is there to experience other than the knowing of it?

Scott Langdon [00:17:22,970]: The knowing of them? Yeah, so the being aware, the awareness.

Scott Langdon [00:17:28,420]: So being aware that you are having an experience. So from that aware place.

Scott Langdon [00:17:36,270]: We see that experience changes us in a sense. And yet the place from which we are aware of all of this does not change.

Scott Langdon [00:17:47,050]: That relationship.

Scott Langdon [00:17:49,790]: Is the relationship that I identify with as God and me.

Scott Langdon [00:17:56,670]: More than just when we do the podcast and I'm editing and I get this feeling of, oh, yeah, this is good or that's not good. That's a duality to a presence. But this is something else. I'm aware that I'm experiencing.

Scott Langdon [00:18:10,470]: I'm aware that my life has meaning to others outside of me.

Scott Langdon [00:18:22,740]: And I find that really fascinating.

Scott Langdon [00:18:26,520]: That I'm aware that my wife, for example, values her experience of me.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:18:38,070]: Right.

Scott Langdon [00:18:38,940]: Being in her life.

Scott Langdon [00:18:42,250]: So the individuality of my experience of her and her individual experience of me and yours of Abigail and mine of you, that individuality seems to be awareness expressing itself as other.

Scott Langdon [00:19:06,689]: How do you see experience in that way?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:19:09,500]: Well, being a philosopher, I'm aware that some philosophies have said, roughly speaking, what you said, Scott.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:19:20,050]: That we start inside and then move outside.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:19:25,910]: And then we see the other looking at us, and so then the other is, you might say, on our visual screen.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:19:33,030]: You can think of it that way. The way you're now on my visual screen. But you can look at it the other way around.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:19:47,170]: The child does not start out in a world alone.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:19:50,530]: The child at first isn't even differentiated from the mother.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:19:55,630]: And so you can look at it either way around, I guess, is what I take it. The time that I had an experience close to what you're talking about, Scott, was very early on.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:11,240]: Abigail and I were vacationing in Maine.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:14,810]: And I remember sitting in the place we'd rented with a nice view of the bay.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:22,400]: And it was guided in prayer.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:27,590]: And the prayer that came to me, just more like inner thoughts, was to bracket the room. It's something the phenomenologists do. You bracket the room. You set aside the reality around you. I believe it's an actual reality that you're immersed in. On the other hand, you can back off from that and just treat it as a screen, like turning off the TV or something. It's still there. You're not watching it anymore. You're bracketing it, setting it aside.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:21:31,740]: And then I'm sitting there becoming more aware. When you do that, you become more aware of things like the weight of your body on the chair, what parts are touching the chair, your feet on the ground, your arm on the armrest, where my elbow is on the armrest. You go in and notice those things. You notice how your head feels to you from the inside.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:22:01,380]: And then I was guided, now set that aside also. All of those sensations, the sense of your body in locations.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:22:07,150]: Well, I found that a puzzling instruction, but I always just go with these things.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:22:30,200]: And then you end up with something like a bare I, the pronoun I, because you've set aside all the things that would define this I.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:22:56,690]: And I always considered that my toehold, you might say, on the concept of the Atman, that kind of self that's beyond the self, that according to Hindu teaching is just part of the universe as the drop of water in the sea, in the ocean. But it didn't feel like a drop of water in anything. It's really too far back to be in anything.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:23:30,200]: And I guess I for a time also thought of that as particularly connected to the divine. And I don't know if I ever changed that view because I then discovered so many things connected to the divine that I don't know if that seemed to have lost its privilege. But maybe that's a key door. Maybe once you've been able to do that as I have and you have, Scott, in a different way. Maybe once you do it, you've got that perspective so that even other experiences kind of have a different look to you, a different sense to you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:23:37,900]: I don't know. Anyway, does my story connect in some meaningful way with yours, Scott, or where would you go from there?

Scott Langdon [00:23:46,320]: It does. Actually, what I've been thinking in terms of experience and this kind of experience.

Scott Langdon [00:23:52,290]: It has to do with the play that I'm doing right now. I'm doing a play called Proof by David Auburn. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. We're doing it in Ambler at the Act II Playhouse, and I play this retired math professor in the University of Chicago who, when he was 21, revolutionized mathematics with his proofs and things. And now he's in his mid-50s and he has been struggling with mental health issues.

Scott Langdon [00:24:32,540]: And he has two daughters, the younger of which at the top of the play turns 25, and the older daughter is 29. But the younger daughter may have some real math genius in her as well. And they have spent a lot of time together. She has been his caretaker.

Scott Langdon [00:24:54,880]: And the relationship between the father, Robert, who I play, and his daughter, Catherine.

Scott Langdon [00:25:04,669]: It was the younger daughter who has the math potential.

Scott Langdon [00:25:12,290]: As we've been rehearsing, we just opened this play last week. We're recording here on a Friday, and last Friday we opened.

Scott Langdon [00:25:19,940]: We've been rehearsing and the script is the script. The lines are the lines. And as the actor, we don't just memorize the lines and then do it in front of people. You memorize the lines, but we're trying to really get at something. Trying to really understand why would Robert say this.

Scott Langdon [00:25:44,280]: Why would he say that?

Scott Langdon [00:25:46,660]: And when we're having a conversation and she says this.

Scott Langdon [00:25:51,970]: How does Robert take that? How does he take it in?

Scott Langdon [00:25:55,950]: And Scott, me as Scott, I'm really interested in that. And so I really spend a lot of time.

Scott Langdon [00:26:02,740]: As Robert.

Scott Langdon [00:26:05,790]: When I've said, I talk to my characters and things, I ask them, what do you, what's going on here? And how are you feeling when she says this? And what does this make you feel? And I'm with him the whole time. And if something, if a way I say a line doesn't work.

Scott Langdon [00:26:25,540]: What does that mean? I don't know. It just doesn't feel truthful. We try it a different way and we rehearse until we get it. And now every time we do the show, it's going to be in one sense the same, but it's also not because it's the first time we're doing it. So it's one of the reasons I love to do theater in a live way.

Scott Langdon [00:26:45,110]: But my point of bringing this up is that as Scott, there were times when we're in rehearsal and I say something, Robert says something, and it doesn't feel right. But then there's another time when he says something and the director has mentioned something to me and I go, oh.

Scott Langdon [00:27:04,380]: Oh, I understand Robert better now.

Scott Langdon [00:27:08,250]: Because of my focus on him, my desire to really understand him.

Scott Langdon [00:27:13,550]: If I see the world differently now because of my serious intention to really fully understand and live Robert to Robert's fullest.

Scott Langdon [00:27:24,700]: I'm changed. God's changed. I wonder how much more than.

Scott Langdon [00:27:30,050]: Is the whoever, whatever the animating force of me is.

Scott Langdon [00:27:35,230]: Which I believe is God, I guess it's my soul, whatever it is that animates me, that lives within me.

Scott Langdon [00:27:42,420]: Is so focused on me.

Scott Langdon [00:27:46,050]: Being my full, my full self.

Scott Langdon [00:27:49,690]: That I have to understand how much that source must love me.

Scott Langdon [00:27:56,560]: Because I know how much I want Robert to be the fullest of Robert. So how much more then would God want me to be? So God must be fully present with me. That's how I see it. And so I see another expression I heard was that you are the experience God is having.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:28:15,160]: Yes.

Scott Langdon [00:28:16,680]: So in a sense, Robert, the experience of Robert, if you go to see this play, Proof, and you're in the audience, what you will experience, if I'm doing my job right, is Robert.

Scott Langdon [00:28:26,700]: In a relationship with his daughter in this scene. You're not going to see Scott.

Scott Langdon [00:28:32,770]: Although you will see Scott, you know what I mean? So in that sense, in every individual that's ever lived, that is living and that will live, that's never going to be duplicated in every single individual.

Scott Langdon [00:28:44,970]: Is God.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:28:47,510]: Then, yeah, as if Scott were to play.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:28:53,280]: Which could happen, you might say, in theory.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:28:57,480]: A trillion different characters. You could go, if you lived long enough and had enough energy, or maybe did a different one every day. That's not quite imaginable, a different one every week. Maybe that is imaginable. Then you could do all of these and you would care. I mean, there's just the funny sense, I take it, Scott, that you could say you love Robert.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:29:26,230]: You're on Robert's side. And part of loving someone is what you've got to do as an actor is understanding them.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:29:40,159]: From the inside, what it's like to be them. That is what you're trying to do. And there's an old theological problem. God is supposed to be omniscient.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:29:52,070]: Well, does he know what it's like to slip on the ice?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:29:58,970]: Does he know what it's like to fear death? To fear one's own mortality, and so on. And one answer that some thinkers came up with is the answer you, in effect, came to, Scott.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:30:16,610]: God knows it because God is enacting, you might say, Scott. And so if Scott fears death, if Scott slips on the ice, if Scott goes through these experiences, what are experiences? Our experiences are all experiences of limitations.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:30:39,610]: Presumably it is not God's own native nature to be limited.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:30:47,450]: But insofar as God is inhabiting and enacting us, God is taking in all of our experiences, including the limitations, including the suffering, but including the joy, the love that we feel for each other. But God knows, God experiences what we experience. And that's one of the key things that comes out directly in God: An Autobiography. And that's why God suffers. Because we suffer, God suffers.

Scott Langdon [00:31:18,810]: Another kind of experience that I wanted to ask you about.

Scott Langdon [00:31:22,570]: Came to my mind because of this play, Proof, that I'm doing. The movie version starred Gwyneth Paltrow as the daughter, Catherine, that I talked about earlier.

Scott Langdon [00:31:36,510]: Gwyneth Paltrow, as it turns out, was in a movie. It was my favorite version of the Jane Austen novel, Emma.

Scott Langdon [00:31:46,430]: I think this is back in the 90s. And there's a great scene in Emma where Emma has a friend, I think her name's Charlotte. I can't remember if that's right, but Charlotte just really tries too hard and is awkward and kind of looks up to Emma. Anyway, so there's this scene where they're at a picnic and there's a game that they're playing that they can say one dull thing, and they kind of tease each other. And Emma's having a bad time with things in her life and she's feeling down. And Charlotte says something awkward again, and Emma says something like, Oh, Charlotte, I thought we were limited to only one dull thing. So she cuts her down, gets to this quick-witted thing, and everyone in the group at the picnic realizes that Emma was in bad form.

Scott Langdon [00:32:48,230]: In fact, her friend Edward says, Bad form, Emma. And there's this low-hanging fruit. She was really easy to make fun of, and she did it.

Scott Langdon [00:32:58,520]: And everyone felt that same feeling, even Emma. As soon as it comes out of her mouth, you can see she knows she shouldn't have said that.

Scott Langdon [00:33:07,230]: Because she insulted her friend.

Scott Langdon [00:33:10,130]: And not only does everyone in the scene in the movie feel it.

Scott Langdon [00:33:16,160]: But I noticed that I was in the audience of the movie theater and you could feel everybody in the audience of the movie theater feeling, oh, Emma, bad form. That was, ouch.

Scott Langdon [00:33:27,920]: So that's one of the reasons I'm really attracted to the arts.

Scott Langdon [00:33:33,600]: But specifically theater and specifically live theater, even though what I was just explaining to you was a film. So this is a movie and here people are in the audience still feeling this way. But live theater where there's an audience and the characters are feeling these feelings together in this world.

Scott Langdon [00:33:50,870]: There's this collective experience that we have that we can turn to. It's a lot like early on you talked about the Liberty Bell. If I say, I'll meet you at the Liberty Bell, what is it that connects you and me and the Liberty Bell that we know how to meet there at a certain time? What is that coalescence? It's a similar idea, I think. But what about that collective experience?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:34:18,690]: Yeah, it's what I think of as the common sensibility. One of my favorite lines, everything God tells me is something God told me and must all be, you might say, more or less equally good, but a favorite line of mine because it opens up a lot. God says, God told Jerry, the personal.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:34:41,420]: Is interpersonal.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:34:44,139]: And one can start from the bare I. But the bare I didn't start as a bare I, as I was saying. The bare I started as an infant and not knowing it was different from the mother's breast. If a person lives long enough, the I becomes differentiated as part of growing up. Part of you starts realizing your own individuality and that when your foot is hurting, that doesn't necessarily mean the whole world is hurting, because at first it certainly feels that way.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:35:26,040]: How does one know? Take that scene in Emma. Why does everyone, and I was struck, you said, because I was thinking it, it's painful. You said, ouch. Everyone, ouch.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:35:35,990]: It's painful.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:35:39,610]: Those are somewhat cultural, in fact. We don't know if that scene would have worked as well in Singapore or just some other location in the world. Maybe yes, maybe no, because a lot of humanity is common. We in many ways do share a common sensibility as all humans, but a lot of it is cultural. And your personhood is something that, like other things in life, you plant it and it grows. You become mature. You develop aspects of yourself. And you develop those things in interaction with other people. That's how you learn.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:36:24,720]: What embarrassment is, for example. Embarrassment is a very fundamental human phenomenon. We're trying to present ourselves a certain way to other people.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:36:37,270]: And there are moments where we don't, or maybe we're not permitted to, or just circumstantial. Someone comes in when you're in the bathroom at the wrong moment and you're embarrassed. Maybe they're embarrassed.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:36:54,520]: These are experiences you develop with other people and the traits you have you develop with other people. And I guess I want to say something a little more extreme than that which is obvious. But their very meaning comes from being in interaction with other people.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:37:12,370]: Embarrassment is not something that makes sense quite for you alone, unless you're alone having a kind of experience imagining the common sensibility around you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:37:28,990]: And embarrassment's just one trivial example, but it's true of all of life. What it is to, here I'm trying to be a philosopher and think good philosophical ideas, but there's an implicit audience for that, which is both other philosophers and anyone else who might be interested in this topic that I'm trying to do philosophy about. And so there's an audience that would barely make sense. It would almost be like a crazy man in the asylum if all I'm doing is just spinning out ideas into the ether, into space, without any sense of there being an audience. I often think as if there were an interlocutor.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:38:12,240]: I'm playing both sides of a Q&A and trying to think, well, is this right? No, but what about this objection? What about this problem?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:38:22,880]: Playing tennis with myself in part, but what I'm doing there is just representing the interlocutors out there, the potential audience of whatever I'm thinking about, the other people who might be interested in thinking about that same thing.

Scott Langdon [00:38:37,290]: Hmm-hmm.

Scott Langdon [00:38:38,840]: Yeah. In the character Robert that I play in Proof, he works in these later years of his life. He's working all the time.

Scott Langdon [00:38:51,340]: Filling up notebooks with writing and math scribbles. But after he's passed and they're going through all of his books, it's all nonsense.

Scott Langdon [00:39:02,410]: It's all, doesn't make any sense. His writing is just words that he scribbled. Sometimes it's sentences that make sense, but they don't make sense together. And so it's that interesting place that I've been thinking about where Robert is. I don't know what he's thinking, but he's doing something. He's writing this stuff down.

Scott Langdon [00:39:26,920]: And the audience, as you say, would be whomever it is that would be reading this proof.

Scott Langdon [00:39:33,190]: But if he's not, and these are the words that they kind of use, that he's out of his mind or he's not out of his mind. So when he's not out of his mind, he's maybe writing a proof that is revolutionary.

Scott Langdon [00:39:48,420]: And the people who could understand it, so that audience who could look at it with some prior knowledge, I guess, go, oh, this is a breakthrough. This makes sense.

Scott Langdon [00:39:58,100]: Those, him later on in his later years, is writing what looks like the same things. If you don't understand math at all, I might look at that book and go, yeah, this is genius, but I don't know it.

Scott Langdon [00:40:12,380]: But a mathematician would look at it and go, this is nothing. This is nonsense. This is just scribbling.

Scott Langdon [00:40:18,860]: So there's something about that connectedness, as you say. The audience has to, that's the other part of that duality, I guess. The other part of the other.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:40:31,460]: The question of is this just scribbling or does it make mathematical sense is really going to be answered by the person who reads it. And ideally they would be able to communicate back and forth. And the mathematician would be able to say, oh, no, no, it looks like scribbling. That's because you're making these wrong assumptions. And what I'm doing is challenging some law or something. And you just didn't put it in the right context. They'd have to go back and forth. It's hard to tell just from some equations.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:41:11,560]: Any mathematician, I gather, mathematicians prove new theorems all the time. I used to have a buddy who was a mathematician, and you can just spin them out, and computers now spin out even more faster. But do they mean anything? And that depends on even equations need a context. They need to be equations about something. Just E equals MC squared would just be letters. E equals MC squared. But there's a context that has to do with the context in which Einstein is doing physics.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:41:55,320]: I was thinking somehow in a very different kind of example.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:42:01,210]: The poet, 19th-century poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:42:07,890]: Taught Latin in a Catholic school, very deep introvert. That must have been kind of challenging. He wrote all this poetry, none of it ever published in his lifetime. He had one friend, not in town, but across in England. They were all in England. And he would send his poems to that one friend who was, in fact, a published poet. Not someone whose name I recognized, but in the day was a recognized poet.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:42:33,890]: And Hopkins, but this is kind of odd. Hopkins' poetry is very strange. I find it hard to read. I became interested in it because for philosophical reasons, he was a follower of a medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus. And Scotus is a philosopher I always found interesting. And I'll say in one moment why.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:42:56,690]: But he had the confidence in his own poetry that he would say, well, if it doesn't look good to you, you don't understand it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:43:06,750]: And I thought, that would be a wonderful kind of confidence to have, but it's not really a warranted confidence. My philosophical interest in him was he believed in the radical particularity of each thing, and it goes back to your sense, Scott, of each person never being replicated, always being different. And Hopkins came clearer on this when he in the Oxford Library found the writings of Duns Scotus, for whom the central metaphysical conception is haecceitas. Haecceitas is, roughly speaking, thisness. If you take the word this and make it into a substantive, that each thing ultimately, you can call it a tree or a dog or a flower or a star, but it's ultimately what it is. It's this. It's this thing. It's a radical particularity.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:44:08,730]: Because he says to say man is a rational animal, well, that doesn't tell you about this man.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:44:15,480]: And his insight was the fundamental reality is not mankind, humankind. It's Scott Langdon.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:44:31,730]: And so Hopkins brings this to poetry. A lot of his poetry can be understood as a poetic enactment of this metaphysical insight that everything ultimately is just itself.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:44:51,980]: And God is in that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:44:55,730]: If you get to the inside of what each thing is, he thought, you're just taking a tree and its thisness and that depth of its thisness.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:45:05,730]: That's where God is.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:45:08,790]: So anyway, this is quite a stunning poetic vision, and philosophically fertile. You could think about that for a while.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:45:22,990]: And what we need to do is go around and, he says, there's this radical particularity divinely inhabited all around you, just waiting.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:45:47,410]: For you to, he doesn't use this phrase, each thing has an inscape, he says. There's landscape, seascape.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:45:55,410]: There's the inscape, which is the inner terrain of a thing. And there's the divine inscape in each thing.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:46:08,790]: And it's just going to waste because people aren't paying any attention.

Scott Langdon [00:46:18,720] 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 1 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.