GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
277. Trusting Your Spiritual Senses & Discernment- What’s on Our Mind?
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Scott Langdon and Dr. Jerry L. Martin explore what it means to trust your spiritual senses and practice discernment in everyday life. How do we recognize genuine spiritual guidance—and how do we test it?
Drawing on God: An Autobiography and Radically Personal, this conversation examines intuition, experience, and reflection in navigating calling, purpose, and trust. Jerry introduces an “epistemics of trust,” where experience becomes the starting point of knowledge—but must be carefully discerned.
Guidance may come through inner awareness, other people, or lived experience. Learning to quiet the mind, listen deeply, and evaluate what we receive is central to spiritual growth.
Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions
Related Episodes:
275. Spiritual Discernment and Religious Experience- Radically Personal
273. Trusting Your Spiritual Senses and Finding Your Calling- From God to Jerry to You
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.
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Scott Langdon
[ 00:00:17,229 ] 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
[ 00:00:58,179 ]Episode 277. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and I join Jerry Martin this week as we return with What's on Our Mind. In this episode, Jerry and I talk about our spiritual senses, what they are, and how we can use them to get in tune with God's will for our lives. But once we understand our spiritual senses and what they're capable of, how do we go about trusting the guidance we seem to be getting? What is trust exactly? And what does it mean to trust in something or someone? How do we go about trusting in God? Here's what's on our mind. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:02:16,319 ]Welcome back everybody to another edition of What's on Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon. I'm with Jerry Martin here and we have a rich array of things to talk about today. And when I say array of things, we're going to be focusing on a point that Jerry brought up in his From God to Jerry to You episode in this unit, which was episode 273. In that he talks about trusting your spiritual senses.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:02:45,569 ]And Jerry, when you had your Intimate Dialogue with Abigail and you were talking about this, you mentioned after a little bit more of an investigation that it might not have actually been spiritual senses but spiritual sensors, which I thought was really interesting. They both mean roughly the same thing. But this idea of being able to pick up on what God is intending for our lives through our spiritual senses, when I think of senses, I think of our five senses.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:22,899 ]The five senses.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:03:23,869 ]Sight, smell, sound, taste, hearing. And being touched and being able to sort of equate that idea. I just think of how different all of my senses are, those five senses are. And yet they are all in a sense, in a sense, that's funny. But they are all directed at the same thing, which is helping me sort of interpret the outside world and help me kind of figure out where I am and what my balance is, where I'm headed, where I'm moving.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:03:57,479 ]If I think about that in a physical way, my senses, they all play an important role and they're varied. And when we lose one, if we start to,maybe we're deaf or we're blind or something happens or we're without one maybe by birth, what it might be, we figure out a way to work without that one. You know what I mean? So there's all kinds of ways in which the senses are so important. And spiritually, I think that's a really great way to look at it too, when we're thinking about where do we want to go in our life, what are what's our direction?
Scott Langdon
[ 00:04:34,219 ]What's our purpose? How can we make sure that we know we're going in the right way, that we're not going to bang into something or that we're not going to fall over somewhere or, you know, our spiritual senses play an important role.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:48,919 ]Yes, I was just puzzling as you were talking. Is this a metaphor, spiritual senses, or is it more or less literally true that in addition to the five senses, there are some more senses that when you look not just at the person as a physical organism, you might say the physical organism has eyes and ears and so forth, and that kind of restricts the domain of what those senses tell us. They certainly tell us about the world that organism encounters. But we're more than just a physical organism.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:28,339 ]We are minds, spirits, souls. And I guess my view is that the soul is by its nature related to the divine and so I guess it's not actually just a metaphor, it's just you've got to expand your conception of what the person is. What are all the things you take in? And as, you know, I'm encountering you and because we're doing it by Zoom, I can see you, well I'm taking to Scott, not just Scott's body, you know, I'm taking in Scott. That's one of our interesting phenomena about our human relations.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:08,039 ] We relate to each other as whole people except when we're oh using somebody or something like that or trying to sell them some garbage bags or something then you're delimiting the person you're dealing with but we're normally dealing with the full person and that includes your own full person and your own full person has these things that I think are not just metaphorical senses it's just you've got to extend the meaning to include things that aren't pinned down to eyes ears etcetera to what your whole self is taking in. And your whole self is taking in a lot and of all kind of whole reality you might say, that includes the divine glimmers. And divine glimmers and insights, prompts, especially relevant to your life often.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:07:06,169 ]God comes to us in so many different ways and each one of us in a very personal way. And in this latest radically personal episode, which is episode two seventy five you talk about William James, reading some William James and talking about how he felt like the individuality was the point, really, to to a large extent. That the fact that each one of us never has been duplicated, replicated, you know, we talked about this I think on another episode that that's one of the things that blew my mind just really contemplating the idea that each one of us is completely unique.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:07:52,639 ]And that just means to me, especially as somebody as an actor, it's so exciting to create a new person every time I'm in a new job, you know. Even if I played the role before, it's so interesting because it's not, it's different because I'm different. So each one is such a unique thing and so I imagine it must be such an interesting idea for God to experience the world or experience otherness as all of this incredibly rich diverse things. God's got to go through life as me.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:08:29,919 ]God's got to go through life as you and as Abigail and as this tree and my dog and like every experience that's possible. And it seems to be driven by this spirit of curiosity and imagination, which is where I think we have a real connection with God. The idea that we have an imagination.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:08:51,199 ]And so when we look for a purpose or what we would like our life to be, what our calling might be, which is another thing that you and Abigail talk about this week as well, the idea of a calling, having it be so particularly unique to us can at the same time overwhelm us because there's so many so much noise from the outside, you should do this, you should do that, you should do the other.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:09:17,189 ]And also the idea of what fits us can sometimes seem so out of reach. You know, I won't be my full self until I've become a doctor or until I've done this or until I've gotten this award or this accomplishment. And so we always feel like that purpose is just out of reach.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:09:43,769 ]And what compounds that oftentimes is feelings of worth in ourselves get really low and low and low because we say, I can't find my quote-unquote purpose and so I'm just gradually losing self-worth. So, the idea of trusting your spiritual senses about where what is God and what is, you know, not of God, you talk about spiritual discernment, how can we focus our spiritual senses so that they are aptly ready to receive the kind of messages we need to receive?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:23,349 ]Yeah, I think the the good news is, you're talking about all this complexity and options and the world's going every which way and and possible vistas of imagination with maybe we should be this and that and, you should be on Broadway and so forth, you know. There are all of these things or maybe, you know, somebody is… I'm married wonderfully but someone can be in a marriage and is this the right marriage and so on. Oh, here's someone else and anyway, there's all of this and your job is your job, you can lose your job. Oh, prices, everything's so expensive. There's all this stuff. All this stuff.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:02,239 ]And the first simplicity is you just have to put all that aside. Put all that aside. And take a deep breath. And this is why people often go off to the woods or to a little private place that they meditate or pray or in, I was reading some Hindu material, they often have a little place in the home that's kind of a little shrine or something with a Krishna thing. And they just go and sort of meditate and pay, do whatever you're supposed to do.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:41,919 ]I think they actually bring food for Krishna. So you go through those things and they quiet the soul, separate it from the rest of all this cacophony that we're immersed in. And what I always find, just from my own prayer experience, if I'm all agitated about something or distracted or this is going on and I'm, oh my god, what about this? I can't pray effectively. I'm stumbling over myself, like trying to run up the stairs too fast and you just trip. Just quiet down, Jerry.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:20,899 ]And so that you might say, it's just you there, or you and God there, you and whatever comes to you in that quiet moment. And I sometimes use this concept of the clarified soul, by which I don't mean super duper spiritual disciplines or something. There are traditions that teach you how to do that. But no, I don't think all that's quite required for most of us. Maybe it's required for certain kinds of spiritual journeys, but for most of us, we just need to quiet down and then kind of as you say, Scott, listen. What comes to you? And I I use prayer as the best because I put a question, what is it that I want to know from God and then I write down what comes to me and I've suggested people try to that even if they don't have my kind of relation to God where God spoke to him and so on and so forth. Just write down what comes to you.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:24,529 ]Keep in mind the possibility there's some divine element in that. So that's just one one technique, but it's just quiet, so it's just you and if God has something to open to you, you're open to it and you can take it in. And then, think about what does it mean? And you think about that too. Okay, this may be kind of vague. Well, think about it some more. Pray or meditate or just get in touch with whatever's deepest inside you and let it direct you.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:14:28,059 ]There's an idea that you explained called an epistemics of trust. And we've encountered that phrase before and I have spent some time with it in my own contemplation and prayer life, what that means, epistemics of trust. And I looked up a number of times the definition of trust, which is a firm belief in the reliability, truth, or strength of someone or something. So I think, okay, I can trust someone. I'm relying… I have a firm belief in their reliability. But then I also think about a trust as in a fiduciary relationship and what that means that there's two sides to it. And if I…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:21,399 ] What do you mean by fiduciary?
Scott Langdon
[ 00:15:25,039 ]fiduciary, sort of in the sense of let's say you're keeping property or monies in a trust for your children or grandchildren until they're of age. And in a sense, I kind of feel that it's a relationship, it's a type of relationship that we have with God in the sense that… we're always coming into our inheritance
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:58,669 ]Yes
Scott Langdon
[ 00:15:59,519 ] Language that's used often in religious and theological discourse: inheritance. And when I think about both of those ways of looking at the word trust, they have a lot in common, I think when I think about our relationship with God and our relationship with one another.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:16:21,859 ]So if you could talk a little bit about the epistemics of trust and how it relates to what our calling is and how to receive our calling and kind of know that it's our calling when we're open with our spiritual senses and we're receiving this calling, we have to trust that it is that. And it might change roads, it might look different along the way. Maybe you start out as a teacher and then something else happens. You know, it's, oh, I have lost my calling. Well, maybe not, maybe it looks a little different down the road. But the trust, we often use the word faith, and you and I talked before we got on air here that faith is a word that's difficult to use sometimes, often misunderstood. So could you talk a little bit about that epistemics of trust?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:16,499 ]Yeah, the epistemic trust I introduced as mainly that you can't know anything unless you trust something. And I argue in Radically Personal mainly for all everything we know and think about starts with experience. We encounter something, and experience isn't just an inner flux, we're encountering the world. Experience is more like a window to the world.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:46,819 ]And things are coming in and you need to trust them. And among the things… you then trust them critically. In other words, you don't just accept the first glance of something coming into your experience. You then think, oh, is there another side to it or is there more to the story? Or is this even I was agitated and therefore I mis-saw what happened. Maybe a witness to a crime scene may have mis-seen, as the eyewitness report that was agitated so out of and with a kind of bias. But the crucial thing in the spiritual life is that you have to learn to trust not just facts, not just observations in a kind of scientific or daily sense, but ideas, intuitions, impulses, even imaginings that come to you as informative. And that's this key part in the spiritual life of openness. You've got to have an open soul, take in what is coming and and the trust part comes that if you have an insight, I was just reading an author who a certain imagining you might say comes as if it were real. And this remarkable writer trusted… she doesn't know if it's real or not real 'cause it's kind of unworldly, you know. You kind of have a sort of vision of something more or less impossible.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:35,449 ]Like someone visiting you in a dream. I've had that experience. Most are just I dreamed about so and so. Every once in a while, I've had a dream in which it seems natural to say, "so and so visited me in a dream."
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:51,889 ]And the bias of trust is, okay, take that, that's data. That's data.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:58,799 ]Don't say, oh, that can't be. It's puzzling, you don't know exactly how it can be, but take it and at first, don't throw it out in advance of taking in what it has to tell you. And then the other thing you were talking about, Scott, becomes crucial at this point. You start with trust, you take things in, you pay attention, you listen, and let every experience, intuition, imagination tell you what it has to tell you.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:32,119 ]And then the crucial task is spiritual discernment. Because there are, if you use old language, there are also demons, you know, there are various kinds of afflictions. Some of them are mental illness after all. Some of them are just hyper or some are just momentary comings and goings within your consciousness. And well, you just can't, if you think a voice is saying jump off the bridge, you don't just jump off the bridge. You kind of ponder it first and you try to, as Saint Paul says, you discern the spirits. Is it the voice of God?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:21:11,999 ]Is this a spirit actually of God that's leading me? And that's true in whatever religious tradition you're talking about, you have to sort and separate out, and then you can get a kind of adequately inspected and adequately looked at from different sides and sort out what's the valid element here in the context of your own life.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:21:45,749 ]Apply it correctly, which may not be what it quite appeared at first glance, but as you pay attention to it and what's coming and always with this sense of the clarified soul of the distractions being out, it's not what are my ambitions, what are my desires, what are my fears, but no, just what is this telling me? That's especially what's it telling me relevant to me? Because that's who it's there for.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:22:20,169 ]Yeah, and that kind of communication can come from so many different sources.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:22:29,299 ]When you and Abigail were talking about trusting your spiritual senses in the intimate dialogue, um, episode 274 this time, Abigail sort of starts right off with, you know, she knows some folks and even in herself sometimes, and I can echo this for me, sometimes it's not best to listen to your own internals, your internal voices, your internal nudges alone, and that being the only thing, that, you know, who do you have around you as a team?
Scott Langdon
[ 00:23:04,099 ]Having a team of folks around you is so important because God will often speak through them as well. And I think about my wife who has helped me, you know, with my bipolar, with my bipolar diagnosis, which is, I mean, that was 1999, so I've had a lot of time to see patterns and see how they work and seasonal, literally seasons.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:23:38,839 ]Winter where I am emotionally and mentally and what what spring is like for me and you know all those things we've sort of traced them over these years and I've gotten to the point where I sort of know when it's coming, a certain low time or even a certain high time, which can almost be more difficult. And so maybe if I'm in a hypermanic time, my wife will say something like, you need to finish your sentences please.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:24:11,679 ]'Cause that's one of the things that I'll do is I'll I'll not finish a sentence and I'll go on to another thing and and well she'll just remind like that and that's something that when I hear if I hear her say that, I realize almost like a bell in the Buddhist tradition when you're coming to meditation and you hear that bell. It's almost like that when she says that to me. Now, it used to be that I might get offended or feel bad about myself that I let myself have a moment like that, that I let her down or that I failed. And if she would say, can you finish your sentences, I might have gotten upset and you know what, I just and then left or whatever.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:57,209 ]Right.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:24:58,029 ]But understanding and being ready and available as often as I can to hear God in me and understanding that it could come from anywhere, any place, any time, I know that if I when I do act, I don't know what I've missed by acting like that in the past. I don't know. I don't think it's important to to know that now. I just know that perhaps I did, and I don't want to in the future. So if she is saying to me, Scott, can you finish your sentence? is what she's really doing is in concern for me. She's showing me that I'm having a time that I need to maybe kind of reflect and maybe be quiet for a while, maybe listen because I'm in this state.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:25:46,459 ]And maybe I need to talk to my therapist about it or, you know, whatever it might be. I'm open now to that. There was a director that I worked with a couple years ago now. I worked with him for the first time. And I realized that I was coming across a little too arrogantly maybe.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:26:09,839 ]And when he talked to me about something, I realized it was the same kind of thing, like he mentioned something about my behavior privately. And because we're friends, but I hadn't… I've never worked with him as a director. And when he said something about how I handled the situation in rehearsal, I realized I could have taken this as he was scolding me, or I could take it as he's pointing something out to me. And in that moment, I realized, and I told him this later, he was God, an instrument of God to me at that moment.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:26:48,379 ]Because when I took it in and realized, yeah, well, this is how it's coming across, whether I meant this or that or the other. I didn't think I meant anything nasty or whatever, but that's how it came across. And so I have to be responsible for that. And then from then on, everything was wonderful. It was, you know, but to be available for how is God coming from the outside and not just relying on, well, I know what's right on the inside and everybody else is against me. I just know what's in the inside. Well, even people who are calling you out for something, you know, you have to face that and go, okay, we have to work, it is what it is. You know, so being able to be present to that is important, I think.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:27:34,689 ]Yeah, those are basic life skills. That's something important even apart from whether it's God or not God, that we need to be able to learn from each other and that kind of lesson where you can take this in assault, someone's pointing out, look, you, I thought you were kind of rude speaking out of turn at that meeting. And you can take offense at that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:28:02,129 ]Maybe it's right, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But the first thing to do is to take it in undefensively and kind of look at my behavior. Was I, do I think I was rude? Was I out of turn? And usually they've got some point or they wouldn't be saying it. You know, if somebody thinks it, then there's probably something a little off in what you did. And maybe they don't have it categorized quite correctly, but you go through that. That's a kind of discernment in life that we all have to go through. That's part of the deep task of paying attention and being reflective and thoughtful.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:28:41,309 ]But at the divine level, our essential instruments of our own spiritual journey are the people around us. And that's where who you trust comes in. You have to trust them too. The people who, especially if you kind of know they're on your side and they're giving you some feedback. Sometimes the person who's not on your side can give you valuable feedback too. That can also be God saying, step back, fellow, as a friend of mine pointed out that even Jesus, you know, he says, ask, who do they say I am?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:29:28,729 ]It's like he needed some validation. Who do they send Peter, you know, who's and I can't now remember the rest of it. You probably remember better than I do, but you know, he's wondering, am I the Messiah or what?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:29:42,399 ]And they have that conversation. And it's early in God: An Autobiography that I'm reporting to Abigail these strange, it's like a strange thing happened to me on the way to the forum, you know, it's just these strange things, God talking to me. Well, God talked to me again today and said blah blah blah. And then Abigail says, after I've done this for, I don't know, some weeks or whatever: Are you going to take this voice seriously? Or is this just entertainment? You know, something to talk about, strange thing.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:30:14,449 ]Oh, well, that is when I started taking it seriously because I realized for my agnostic modern person, for, you know, none of this, I was too secular for it to quite make sense. So it was just bizarre experiences. But I did believe them. But I just couldn't embrace that belief. I was holding it at arm's length. Because I would, when God told me to do things, I would do them. Because, well, they weren't jump off the bridge after all. They were harmless, though often seemed meaningless. But I would still kind of hold it at arm's length. And no, I needed… there was a matter of trust. Well, I trusted Abigail.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:30:52,339 ]I certainly trusted her love for me. And she's a perceptive person, so often one of the things you trust is another person's judgment and with good reason. You know what their pattern of judging situations has been, so you trust it. And so, yeah, they can be, I asked Mark Grollo, we did an interview with him, maybe his spiritual story. How did you become a minister? Well, in one week, I guess as he was talking about his theological studies or something, three different people told him, you should be a minister. Okay. And he became an impressively talented minister. Wonderful guy.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:31:44,549 ]Mmm, yes, yes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:31:46,269 ]But that's the life we have. We've got to listen to God's voice however it's coming. It could be something you're reading, you know, a novel that makes you think about different types of situations, different ideas.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:31:59,869 ]It can be all these sources, one thing I saw on television. Here's another random input. Very early in my God journey, you might say, wondering what am I? How am I going to do this? I still had a career in Washington DC, pumping away in the power corridors of the District of Columbia.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:32:29,639 ]And feeling I can't be a St. Paul or a Dalai Lama or something; I'm just a guy. A TV program happened to come on as I was just flipping around channels and it was a religious station and there was an interview, seemed kind of interesting, and it was a black guy who had become a gospel singer.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:32:58,309 ]He had never, and he was reporting: I had never sung in my life. But I received, you know, prayer guidance to start singing gospel. And I did. And he said, this was the line, I still remember it: “Those who God calls, He equips." In other words, if you have a certain calling and you feel you have it and you check it out, then don't worry. The means will be there and you probably have more capacity even in yourself latent in yourself than you realize. And so try that out. With due diligence, you know, never never jump off the bridge, that's not not wise. But if God tells you to do something, then trust that you can probably do it or that the effort to do it will itself be a good thing.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:34:15,259 ]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.