296. What’s Your Spiritual Story? The Search for Truth with Alex Woollends

What happens when the search for truth becomes a search for God?

In this episode of What’s Your Spiritual Story?, philosopher Alex Woollends joins Jerry L. Martin to share an intellectual and deeply personal journey shaped by conscience, philosophy, spiritual discernment, and the desire to become a better person.

Alex describes growing up around religious belief while struggling with explanations that did not satisfy his questions. His search led him through libertarianism, ethical intuitionism, philosophical idealism, and the work of thinkers including Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, George Berkeley, Plato, Carl Jung, Michael Huemer, Gene Callahan, and J. Budziszewski.

Along the way, Alex began to see conscience not merely as a feeling, but as a genuine source of moral knowledge. He came to question ideology itself, explore the spiritual nature of reality, and consider whether truth must ultimately be discovered through lived experience.

That journey eventually brought him to God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher. In its account of divine reality, interconnectedness, transformation, and human participation in God’s ongoing action, Alex encountered ideas that closely reflected the path he had already been following.

Together, Jerry and Alex explore the relationship between philosophy and religion, the meaning of conscience, the limits of ideology, the nature of ultimate mind, the significance of Jesus, and the possibility that becoming a better person can help make the world itself better.

This is a thoughtful conversation for anyone searching for truth, wrestling with belief, questioning inherited religion, or wondering how philosophy can become a lived spiritual path.

Join the conversation on the Ultimate Questions Substack: Does each of us have a personal calling that responds to something beyond ourselves?

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

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

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• 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.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

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Transcript

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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.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

[ 00:00:58,299 ]Episode two ninety six. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm your host Scott Langdon. And I'm excited to bring you this week's episode which comes to you via our series of episodes we call What's Your Spiritual Story? I'm excited about this episode because Jerry speaks this week with philosopher Alex Woollends from Austin Texas. And Alex tells Jerry his very fascinating spiritual story. It's fascinating because of the way Alex tells his story, the way he goes from there to here, but also because of the story itself, and the way his persistent desire to know why and what's next leads him to a more complete understanding of God. Here's Jerry to get things going. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:13,409 ]Oh, Alex, it's good to see you. I very much appreciate your willingness to share your spiritual story. I mean, most people don't walk around thinking they have a spiritual story, so it's not until I ask.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:02:26,989 ]Yes, I really didn't have, I didn't think of that either. That's why when you asked, I thought, well, wait a minute, what is it? And I started thinking, I was like, jeez, I don't even know. I thought, well, if God has helped set this up, I thought, I guess He'll urge or nudge Jerry to ask the appropriate question.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:02:42,369 ]And I thought, but if I don't think, am I doing my due diligence? You start going through these thoughts in your head, you know. So yes sir, I don't know though.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:52,309 ]So it may be you don't have a spiritual story until somebody asks you what it is and then, oh, wait a minute, I go back. Just often you don't, a memory doesn't come to mind until someone says, "What do you remember?" and then, oh, well, I guess I do remember this and that. Well, in your case, you know, we've been in communication for a while and it's my impression you now live in the Austin, Texas area.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:03:17,819 ]Yes, sir.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:19,129 ]Yeah, but I don't know where you grew up. So let's just start there. Put you in situ as they say. Where did you grow up?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:03:31,129 ]Yes sir. Now, an interesting possible synchronicity. I was born in San Antonio, Texas.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:38,539 ]Okay.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:03:39,449 ]And, I lived in Lubbock for a while, in Lubbock, Texas.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:46,539 ]That's not far from where I was born.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:03:49,209 ]Exactly. Yeah, I saw that in the book too and then also on the website where you were talking about where you were born. And of course, I went to school, to Texas Tech University.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:02,699 ]Yeah.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:04:03,519 ]And that's when I heard a talk, you know, I was the assistant to the front desk for the philosophy department at Texas Tech University, and I think it was Dr. Webb that had a discussion with you and other people, you were doing a presentation. And I'm like, there's someone who says he talks to God. And I thought, that is very interesting.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:04:27,279 ]But that was about it. That was literally it.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:04:32,129 ]And that was about it and I think I was probably going to get like a Monster Energy drink or something like that for the day. And my roommate, Tanner, a good friend of mine, he went and he visited you.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:04:44,699 ]And Dr. Webb and Tanner came out after they had spoken with you, and Webb looked shocked, you know, he just looked at everybody and he said, that man is not crazy. Right.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:05:00,049 ]I thought, what a strange thing to say, because Webb is a, you know, as an atheist, I think even probably now, but anyway, I thought, well, that's peculiar. And, things led from there. But anyway, I'm rambling.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:13,229 ]That's an interesting background. This happens to people. You know, you cross paths. We almost crossed paths. We semi-crossed paths.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:05:21,149 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:22,699 ]And the atheists, even the atheists, conclude I'm not crazy.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:05:27,509 ]Yes I agree with that by the way.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:30,909 ]So, that's a good start. I mean, you're evaluating, it's like eyewitness testimony in a law court. You have to evaluate it and if someone reports something very, very, very bizarre, like alien invasion or something, your first question is, is this person crazy? You know, what's the quality of the eyewitness? And an awful lot of our communications with each other depend on you decide whose eyewitness, who can you trust? And who's trustworthy and that's a question of their character and temperament, situation, and so forth. And so even the atheists decided this guy isn't crazy.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:10,989 ]Whatever it is, he just got some beliefs that make no sense to me as an atheist, I suppose, you know. Well, that's how life is. There's a lot that an atheist tends to leave out from the view of many of us. But, back to your story. Okay, you were in San Antonio, beautiful city, one of my favorite places to go to a conference. And then Lubbock, which is close to home. But where were you going? Where was your family? Was it still in San Antonio?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:06:41,799 ]Good question.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:06:43,039 ]My mother was from San Antonio. My father, he passed away this past September. But he was British. And he was was living in Canada and he came down to the States here in Texas, and that's where he met my mother. And so I was born in San Antonio and I stayed here till I was twelve or thirteen and then went up to Canada. And that was awesome. Canada is idyllic.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:13,919 ]What a difference.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:07:15,349 ]Oh what a difference, yes, but then we came back down here for business reasons for my father. And I remember thinking Canada was just like Eden-like in some places it was. It probably still is, but that's the nuts and bolts of it I guess. It's a long story that the coming to and the coming around, but that's the nuts and bolts.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:39,349 ]Yeah, it is. Were they at all religious themselves?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:07:43,649 ]Oh, good question. Yes, and that was, I think that's where like, that's a good question. So, that is where I think maybe the journey may even start. That's a great prompt from you there, Jerry, because my parents were religious. They believe in God, but I don't think, and this is, I think true for a lot of believers, is they don't have the I hate to use this kind of language but the the metaphysical, the correct metaphysics and epistemology. And this was...

Alex Woollends

[ 00:08:23,289 ]something I think, this sounds high level, but it's relevant in the sense that a lot of people these days, their parents are religious themselves, but they're not religious. And I think the reason for that is the things that the parents say with regard to belief, sometimes they don't make sense or they're not necessarily justified in a way. It's like you hear someone, your parents talk about how they believe in God and you think, well, why?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:53,379 ]Right.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:08:54,529 ]And that comes from a young age and you know unless that answer why sounds reasonable to you or something that you feel a lived experience with the why so to speak, it's just your parents are religious and it has like no effect on you. If anything, I would see my parents being very religious on things and I would think, I'm not sure. Like the idea that you know if you don't hear the quote unquote the word, you know, that you're just gonna burn in this awful place for eternity, you know, and I thought, what?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:09:24,189 ]How is that? How's that even possible to reconcile? And so they were very religious, but I would say it didn't have as much of an effect on me, I think, as they wanted.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:36,009 ]So what kind of religion? That sounds kind of evangelical or fundamentalist or something like that.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:09:42,989 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:43,489 ]Was hell playing a big role?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:09:46,109 ]Yes, of course. Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:49,539 ]Yeah

Alex Woollends

[ 00:09:50,029 ]And I always thought that was very funny too. Like, you know someone who's, you know, I don't mean to bash on Christians, but if you typically ask a Christian like why you should believe in Jesus, they'll say, well, you know, you don't want to go to hell now, do you? And it's such a peculiar thing to me because one of my friends, his name is Nathan, he has two little boys. And it's such a strange thing if I say, why do you provide for them?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:10:19,869 ]Why do you feed them?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:10:20,719 ]And he told me, Alex, are you serious? I mean, like they would arrest me. And I would spend like, who knows, like now it's a felony, I think child endangerment's like 10 or 20 years in the penitentiary. And I'd sit there and I'd... you'd stare at him and go, wait, what? I don't know how that makes sense. So, that was kind of the attitude I think that was there, which is interesting because my mother's Catholic. Or was Catholic and she moved away from that to more evangelical stuff. But to answer your question, yes, there was a lot of hell and that was, you know, tying into the disassociation with my parents. That was one of those things where I was like, why?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:10:59,569 ]And that doesn't make any sense to me.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:01,489 ]Yeah Yeah, so that's interesting. And w so did they go to a church?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:11:07,229 ]For that, no.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:11:09,289 ] I think they tried going to several churches and some of those were evangelical too, and trying to remember, it was very briefly, I think just a couple churches we tried maybe, but I always felt such a disconnect with Protestantism. In a sense, and I not so necessarily have an affinity to Catholicism, I just find more truth there if that makes sense, and more reasonableness. But we only went to churches I think a little bit of time, but that's again when I started experiencing that disconnect that, well, I hear what you're saying, but why, you know?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:11:49,309 ]And just like you're saying, you want a fundamental understanding, right, for that why to make sense for you. And I wasn't getting that in the churches too. And also I remembered from the book for your experiences, you said you went to different churches and places and you went to a certain church and you didn't name it, of course, but you said I walked out feeling suffocated.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:12:15,599 ]You just said I just had to get out of there, right? It was just like, yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:20,399 ]I felt that there was no oxygen in this room.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:12:22,419 ]There's no oxygen in this room.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:23,989 ]The door to get out

Alex Woollends

[ 00:12:25,389 ]Yeah, and that's so funny.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:27,119 ]Certain kind probably an urban Protestant church, probably a liberal church, I don't know, you know, but the problem with those we talked the problem the evangelicals have one kind of problem, they always focus on hell and rewards and punishments as the key to your religiosity. But the liberal Protestants often are essentially secular.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:12:49,559 ]Yes, basically.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:51,819 ]Yeah, and so they might as well be secular humanists. The Ethical Culture Society used to exist for those people. And they tend to lose members because that's not very gripping.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:13:03,959 ]No, no. Doesn't require sacrifice either.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:07,059 ]Yeah, it's a narrow part. So then you moved to… so none of that grabbed you. And did you continue a... did you have a kind of spiritual search or did that... did you just pursue other interests? 

Alex Woollends

[ 00:13:24,469 ]Yes, a little bit of… it's funny that the spiritualness I think came out of I think Voegelin actually talks about this and you know when civilizations are falling apart you don't have anything to grab onto right as far as like the truth he calls this refers to the experience

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:48,189 ]Eric Voegelin.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:13:50,199 ]Yes, sir, the philosophy of history.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:52,089 ]Philosopher of history and so on.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:13:53,449 ]Yes, sir, and that metaxi, that, you know, the in-between, so to speak, where you're like, ah, I know this, but I don't know everything, so, you know, it drives you nuts. I couldn't get any grounding as Voegelin would put it. The ground of being, I didn't feel I was existing in truth, as he would say. And so I started searching for what the truth was because I wasn't getting it from the church, my parents really, bless their hearts, they just didn't have the intellectual background or the wherewithal for me to ask those sorts of questions. And I got into ideology. Libertarian ideology actually and liberal ideology, but I just felt a feeling that it wasn't correct. There was a deadness to it. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:44,789 ]Yeah, describe it. What was the ideology that just outline it for a moment that seemed dead or inadequate?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:14:54,119 ]I think it's the… well, from the technical point of view it's called libertarianism, right? But I think that a better point of view is voluntarism. So, and this is kind of tying a lot of things together, so when you're trying to determine the just use of force and you're like, well, we're just gonna say that, if it, quote unquote doesn't hurt anybody, right? And you want to do it and they're both adults and the other person's an adult, then go ahead, right?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:15:31,119 ]You know, this voluntaristic, you should not be told or forced to do something that in some sense you did not volunteer for. So, but I quickly found out that of course we have ethical obligations regardless of whether or not we agreed to them. And on top of that, there's some really dark and gross places you can go to when you're like, well, they have two consenting adults and they both agree to do something, you know, it started to hit my conscience.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:16:02,319 ]Like how could that be right?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:03,599 ]Yeah.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:16:04,349 ]It was a very strong feeling of this is wrong. It was like it was a permeation, like a thickness in the room that I couldn't escape.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:14,369 ]Yeah.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:16:15,189 ]Like a frame that you see the world through in a sense. And that maybe where my spiritual journey started is I was discussing this with a friend who was intellectual and he recommended a book Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man by J. Budziszewski, who probably not coincidentally also teaches here at University of Austin.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:43,489 ]Yeah.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:16:44,339 ]And the interesting thesis of the book was, it's only 90 pages but it's searing. And it says, we all know deep down what's right or wrong. We just wish we didn't. And so, we get into this… we wish we didn't know. We get into a great political theater about trying to find the truth and he said, but they're not trying at all, he said.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:05,339 ]Yes

Alex Woollends

[ 00:17:06,039 ]And, that really shook me and I realized that the feeling I was getting was literally my conscience, right? And that's why I couldn't ignore it.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:17:16,409 ]And that's where kind of everything blew up because I couldn't rely, you know, on, you want to know the right thing? Oh, read this. You want to do this, you read this, right? It was more of a search inside, than a rule book that I needed to follow.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:32,289 ]Yeah, that's interesting. But the voice of conscience is really an amazing phenomenon, isn't it?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:41,069 ]I mean it's because it's you might say almost pre-cultural, you know, and people in different cultures feel pangs of conscience.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:17:51,589 ]Yes. Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:53,439 ]And it's what sort of especially on the negative. Don't go there. Don't do that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:01,859 ]Yeah, and that's an amazing thing. So you start paying attention to conscience and just this libertarian or voluntarist idea, if you feel like it, it's okay. And somebody else, if they feel like it too, it's okay.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:18:19,709 ]It's okay.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:20,519 ]Let's shoot up together, okay?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:18:22,569 ]Yeah. Let's help commit suicide together and you're thinking wait I'm pretty sure it's like anything together.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:29,829 ]Just as long as everybody signs up. And that's fairly empty. And the emptiness of it is pointed up, as I understand what you're saying, Alex, by conscience. Because conscience doesn't agree with that if it feels good, do it or if you just happen to arbitrarily feel like doing it, want to do it, do it. That's okay, there are no other rules, there's no honor thy father and thy mother or anything else going on. Conscience doesn't allow that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:19:20,399 ]So where did you go next? I mean, if you think, okay, you're moving along, you realize you've tried the libertarian thing, it has something to offer and yet seems fatally flawed.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:19:33,199 ]Yes, absolutely. And I saw that the people, well, first that, you know, trying to do my just diligence, right? And this all ties together now that I think, this is very interesting, Jerry. I'm putting this together in my head as you're asking me questions, but it's guiding me towards, I think, an idea that I have. That this is less discombobulated than I imagined it would be. But, after I read that, my next question was philosophical. What is that… how can I put this…is our conscience quote unquote justified, right?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:20:13,819 ]Is that veridical experience or, you know, is that true experience or whatever, how you want to categorize it. And I read a book Ethical Intuitionism by philosopher Michael Huemer. And I proceeded to get into an argument with him. This was way back in 2001. And I was arguing from the libertarian perspective because I was going to give it the strongest, you know, point of view to attack someone who was saying, you know, ethical intuitionism, you know, no, I'm pretty sure we know what's right or wrong. You know, and I lost.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:20:46,909 ] He won the argument.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:20:49,559 ]I read this book and I thought, oh my god, this is literally the justification for uh for consciousness. Of course, as you know, but people who don't know here that ethical intuitionism is metaethics, right? Dealing instead of dealing with propositional statements like it's bad to do, is it bad to do blah blah blah, which could be answered with a yes or no, you know, ethical intuitionism is metaethics, like what is the nature of good, right? And you can't say you can't answer that question with yes or no.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:21:14,669 ]So they're non-propositional questions, that can't be answered that way. So I found that and I thought, oh my gosh, I guess this book is true. And then I thought, well maybe I'm in the wrong ideology. That's the problem.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:21:28,839 ]It's not libertarian, it's another one of these. But, one of the mentors that I followed, Gene Callahan, who's also, synchronicity, a member of the Voegelin View, who's actually also published on there.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:21:43,029 ]Okay.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:21:44,089 ]He left libertarianism and for much the same reason. And at the time I remember being shocked because he was a big advocate of it. But after finding this out, you know, reading the book Revenge of Conscience, reading Ethical Intuitionism and feeling that conscience is justified, I followed him and read his posts because I wanted to know where to go next. What ideology do I need that's the real one? But after reading what he has to say, reading some Voegelin and others, I thought, you know, and Plato especially, I thought, oh my god, it's not what ideology that you have, it's ideology period is wrong.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:22:23,249 ]Yes

Alex Woollends

[ 00:22:24,199 ]As Voegelin says ideologies are existential stances to reality, right? You know, I'm a blah blah blah, you know, I'm a capitalist, I'm a communist, I'm a feminist, I'm an egalitarian, I'm a... and then of course Voegelin says don't be an ism-ist, right? Just look at things in front of you and listen to the quiet voice. So that right there was the big quote-unquote jump-off moment where I thought, oh, there's no book that I can just pick up and get like an instruction manual and there it is, right? And that and that proceeded from there.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:22:55,849 ]Yeah, that's interesting. So, your search was not futile. You're getting somewhere in your search.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:23:03,079 ]Yes, sir.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:04,169 ]And Voegelin, okay, decided it's not a question of which is the right ideology.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:23:10,969 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:12,059 ]It's what to learn how to take in reality and what's true and not less true about it on your own in a kind of yes, I don't know, using, you know, Plato uses dialectic meditation, all of these equipment that we have, listening to your conscience is one of them. And refining your ethical intuitions would be another. We talk on this podcast a lot about spiritual discernment. There's moral discernment, there's discernment of character. You always have to be refining your discerning capabilities.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:50,909 ]So where did you go next? I’m thinking is that where you come to?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:23:58,419 ]Oh no, it keeps going.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:24:01,019 ]Well, let's follow, let's keep it going then.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:24:04,749 ]Yes. After Voegelin, I thought, okay, it's not ideology at all. I just need spiritual discernment. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:24:16,679 ]Yes, yes.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:24:17,649 ]But this was peculiar because I was like, well, why am I reading what the philosophers say? And yeah, I was talking to Gene. Gene is a mentor of mine and I followed his blog and just got into conversations with him.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:24:37,059 ]He introduced me to idealist philosopher Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, which was even to this day absolutely profound. I figuratively, I could be wrong, of course, I'm just me, right? But he seems to have cracked what philosophy is and put it on a correct ontological basis. As he puts it, philosophy is unconditioned or unbounded experience. To ask it philosophical questions are questions that can't be categorized because the minute you say philosophy is this, philosophy goes, oh yeah, why is that?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:25:16,829 ]And then you're off to the races again. And he said so it requires an openness to experience, if you will, to be a philosopher. And when I was going to school, I realized that the people who were talking to me were not open to experience. In these philosophy classes, they were either right-wing or left-wing or, you know, I was like, I'm just trying to read philosophy. I'm pretty sure that philosophy doesn't care about what political leanings there are, right? And, Gene made the connection and he said, well, Alex, that openness to experience is living religiously.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:25:54,869 ]To the true philosophers and as Voegelin I think would say true religion, all does the same thing. It's pointing towards the inner experience that you have. 

Alex Woollends

[ 00:26:08,719 ]And it kind of goes back to the book, Revenge of Conscience, you know, knowing what's right or wrong. We all know a little bit more than we probably seem to, right? Or that we would want to. So, and then of course Plato says, know thyself. and you're like, well

Alex Woollends

[ 00:26:23,289 ]Why should I bother doing that stuff? Well, the truth is inside yourself necessarily, right? Our minds don't jump out and then go into some alternate reality then come back into our heads and report. You're a part of my experience right now.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:26:35,689 ]Yeah.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:26:36,449 ]You're in my experience. And so this inwardness that the philosophers were talking about, that Voegelin was talking about, I think the metaxi, like, when you go into yourself and you go, well, I know this is true, but I don't know if this is true. So what do I do with it? That was when I realized that I think philosophy and religion are really two sides of the same coin. You can't be philosophical unless you're open to experience, and unless you're open to the truth, and you can't be religious unless you're open to experience or willing to do the truthful thing.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:27:11,469 ]Yeah, religion always has, I guess philosophy too, from in fact, as you've just said, religion always has the threat of what I call the idolatry of belief.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:27:25,769 ]Mmm.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:27:26,889 ] What you want isn't truth, you want my religion.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:27:29,489 ]Religion.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:27:30,329 ]One to accept your decalogue, you know, your particular creed and well that's not the quest for truth. The quest for truth is more open-ended and more risky than that.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:27:45,299 ]Yes,  absolutely. And I think that's that tension there, I think seemingly what Voegelin talking about, the metaxy, right? Not it's not an actual place, of course. You know more Voegelin than I do, of course.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:27:58,379 ]Yeah, as I understand the metaxi, since we're using that word, that in Voegelin’s view, human beings, the human soul, let's say, is by its very nature related to the divine.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:28:14,879 ]Hmm Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:16,739 ]Oriented to the divine, it participates in the divine, but it can't grab the divine. It can't put the divine in bottles, it can't put precise labels on the divine. He often calls it the beyond. It's not graspable in that sense, even cognitively. In a neat way, you can't have like the way we have this beautiful chemical table of elements, you know. There's nothing like that for the divine. And so the strain of the religious life, of the spiritual life, of the philosophical life, he would say as well, is maintaining this tension.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:56,509 ]This is the most important thing. I do relate to it. It kind of comes into me, you know.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:04,659 ]Yet I can't nail it down in any way. And so you have to live in that stretched out here. What's the phrase he uses editors are always correcting… 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:19,589 ]Tension toward the divine but it's like a stretched rubber band, you know, that always is in danger of snapping back. And in his view, that's what ideologies do. They just can't stand the tension.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:29:32,979 ]They can't stand, yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:29:34,329 ]Yeah, so they package it in some way. Whatever their idea of the most true thing is, they put it in a little package of labels and arguments and so on and try to sell it to people or sometimes force it on people.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:29:46,639 ]Yes, sir.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:29:47,749 ]Absolutely, Jerry, and I experienced that. That was the whole, I think, experience that I had way back when I read Revenge of Conscience is I experienced that tension. And I was trying to orient myself towards truth, but there was something in my beliefs that wasn't letting me do that. And that something was also telling me that the voluntarism is wrong. So that tension was really hard. And I think maybe even Nietzsche felt that extremely strongly, but I think Voegelin thought that I believe Nietzsche was like basically a prophet in the sense that once you chop God off, you get the problems that we see here today.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:30:27,069 ]And I think, you know, of course that's Voegelin's diagnosis, pneumopathology. We have a bunch of people that don't want to exist in tension. Because it's uncomfortable, right? It's very uncomfortable. And I get that. I've done it too. In fact, I was trying to do it when I first started. I was trying to get rid of it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:30:46,929 ]But it's hard.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:30:47,709 ]It's very hard.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:30:48,939 ]Yeah. And so, that's interesting, Alex, and where did you go next in your soul journey that you're going on?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:30:57,859 ]Yes sir, I was like, well, I don't understand how…

Alex Woollends

[ 00:31:05,169 ]Well, after Voegelin, I was trying to figure out, okay, so if I have to fix myself to understand the path, or you know to have a grounding in truth, to exist in truth as he puts it, what is true? So now we've gone, you know, existing in tension to acknowledging the tension and then going, okay, well this is my attempt to get at the truth. And Gene very helpfully talked to me about philosophical idealism.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:31:44,349 ]The idea that of course as you, I'm sure you know, idealism is a broad category. I'm referring to it more along the lines as that reality is ultimately mental or spiritual in nature.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:31:59,409 ]There's no subject object distinction.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:32:02,669 ]As Oakeshott would say, I'm a subject and my world is full of objects. And those objects have meaning to me and only meaning to me. Like if I could take my experience and put it in your head, you wouldn't be looking at my experience even as mine, you'd be looking at my experience through Jerry's experience.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:32:24,319 ]I see.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:32:24,929 ]Does that make sense?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:32:25,619 ]It doesn't mean that things are completely subjective, of course. He rejects that too, because that just puts it back in the subjectivity box. But he was talking about the connectedness between subjects and objects. And for me spiritually, that had a big linkage because I thought, how can I get at the truth? How do I know what the truth is? And so you keep going down on these layers of knowing, quote unquote, what is it to know? For example, is it self? What I was looking for was the nature of things. What is being?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:33:04,399 ]The philosophical question is what is all of this. Berkeley of course had the view that, you know, I came across Berkeley's master argument, you know, for God being ultimate mind and that really completely blew me away.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:33:19,759 ]Right.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:33:20,529 ] Berkeley’s master argument, later idealists as you probably know would say, okay, well that's not exactly correct, but your conclusion is. So that was basically where Oakeshott took it because…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:33:32,459 ]Yeah, but reality is essentially mental or spiritual.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:33:36,619 ]Yes. And that's how I have access to it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:33:40,319 ]Or intellectual would be another way too– intellectual.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:33:43,699 ]Yes, sir.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:33:44,749 ]And that's how I can have access to the truth. And that's also why knowing myself means that I, as Plato said, know other things or everything even in a sense, because everything is related to me. And I'm related to everything else. There's no disconnect of, you know, I don't have hands? Here they are.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:34:05,759 ]Experience as Oakeshott says, experience is truth. We just have to take it, everything is real, he says, just so long as we take it not more or less than what it actually is. Because the minute you say this isn't true, really you say, well, how is that? It has to be real in some way. Right?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:34:26,049 ]So that was the coming together because in a lot of spiritual practice there's this kind of a how do I get at what's real or the world is this kind of a oneness in the world. But that wasn't something that made any sense to me at the time because I didn't have that idea that, you know, there was no real subject-object distinction, there was just experience. And that experience was ultimately mental or spiritual in nature.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:34:54,919 ]And so when I was reading the book, and you were speaking to Him, and He gave you an image of the interconnectedness of the universe, and you remembered you being shocked by it. I remember reading it going, oh my god, and further in the book, one of the things that Oakeshott says in Experience and Its Modes  is that to be real is to be transformed. There is no insignificant static experience. And I remember wondering about that.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:35:28,799 ]How's that? and then it was years later when I read the book, and one of the chapters I think is chapter four or five, it says, the heart of reality is transformation.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:35:38,869 ]Yeah, in God: An Autobiography.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:35:40,989 ]Yes, sir.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:35:41,719 ]And it's literally even now I get a little bit of goosebumps. Like it was as if my… this is kind of I guess where it's tying into my spiritual journey. Basically, all of the things that I had been following, even reincarnation, was all in there. And I had just jumped on the foots the shoulders of giants trying to get at the truth. I didn't care about if I had come up to it and to see that all in there, it was just such a startling experience for me. Even Voegelin’s disease of the spirit, the pneumatopathology, you know, how ideologies are broken, you know, that's in there.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:36:20,109 ]So yes, all these things, I guess I might be jumping ahead, but all of that was in there and that was the reason why it just struck me with so much force.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:36:30,679 ]So, as you were following your journey and then you came at some point upon God: An Autobiography, it connected with the things you were finding in your journey.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:36:40,559 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:36:41,129 ]And I guess you might say confirmed or affirmed them. But back to your own story, if we don't want to jump ahead.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:36:51,129 ]Ahaha

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:36:51,879 ]What came next in your own study. You found that there's some sense in which reality is spiritual consciousness or mind or something like that. And it's coming to you that it's transformative. That there's something transformative about that: know thyself and somehow that's going to be transformative. And I guess by the Oakeshott argument, any experience if you pay attention to it, I'm making a little gesture here, well that has ripples of meaning, right?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:37:25,469 ]Yes, yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:37:26,519 ]Change because I guess the experience is not static, like the data on a page and then you just turn another page and that data is out of mind. But these are… you're experiencing in a dynamic way. People are making sense of things all along, they're connecting to each other. And since in some sense everything's connected to everything, that was one of the things that you came across.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:37:57,099 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:37:58,289 ]That it's this, you're part of this dynamic change going on and that's part of the transformative aspect. And then where did you go next, Alex? That's fascinating.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:38:12,359 ]Yes, I thought to myself, okay, so this is why, in a sense, it colored religion in such a profoundly different way. Because, you know, one of the things that Oakeshott says in Experience and Its Modes is to change the part is to change the whole.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:38:36,359 ]And the whole book is unbelievable. He just speaks like that and you sit there and you read and go, what on earth is he talking about? Because it's really no argumentation like premise premise premise, right? He's just making an observation about experience. But I thought, wait a minute, if I become a better man, then the world becomes a better place.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:38:56,789 ]A better world.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:38:57,899 ]A better world. Because to change the part is to change the whole.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:39:03,489 ]And then I thought about Plato's know thyself. I thought, oh my god, I believe they're talking about the same thing because to find the truth inside of you is to necessarily find the truth in the world because you're in the world. You're participating as you said, Voegelin says, in participation of being, right?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:39:21,689 ]And you're transforming along with it. It's transforming, you're transforming. You  are participants in action. And I think that's also again in the God book where He says we're partners in the flow of action.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:39:31,599 ]Yes.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:39:32,399 ]Again, there's just literally, Jerry, like every other page, I'm getting ahead of myself. I was like, had to put it down. But when I realized that and I was looking at religion and God, and Jesus, I thought, so I have to make myself better in order to make the world a better place.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:39:54,779 ]So then the question is, well, how do we make myself better?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:40:00,429 ]Like what do I do, and then the answer of course, you know, if truth is in experience and it's in yourself, then you have to search inward.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:40:10,489 ]So, what am I searching for? Well, if I'm trying to be a good person, it can't necessarily be what I want to do. In a sense, it's like the command comes from within me not to do it, but it's not something that I may even want.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:40:27,009 ]Yes. And so then you can't trust your desires.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:40:31,149 ]You can't trust your desires.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:40:32,839 ]Momentary wants and so forth.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:40:35,319 ]And so then I thought to myself, well, if this is all mental… All of this mental, spiritual in nature, just different types of mental stuff. Like of course this table exists, right? Ideals wouldn't say that table doesn't exist. It's just mental too. That's why we can look at it. That's why we can examine it. It's mind, right?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:40:59,039 ]But then the question is, well, I can sit here and close my eyes and wish for this not to be true, but no, it's still there. So then the idealists were saying, well, if everything's mind, what kind of entity could produce the reality that we're participating in? Such an entity would have to be a mind itself.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:41:23,419 ]And because of our observations of the experience we have, this mind would have to be infinite, all-encompassing. So you see where this is going. And I thought, this is sounding a lot like what people refer to typically as God.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:41:41,829 ]Yeah.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:41:42,569 ]And so I thought, okay.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:41:44,459 ]This is, you know, I thought to myself, this of course struck me as profound. But I thought, wait, wait a minute. We still haven't gotten to the Abrahamic God. We've just gotten to the order of existence or experience, right?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:41:58,049 ]Mhm

Alex Woollends

[ 00:41:58,689 ]And so that was the next step. Once I realized that this was ultimately mind and the author of it had itself to be an ultimate mind himself, then the question is what is the nature of that mind? So that was, I guess, the next step. If that makes sense.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:42:17,989 ]So what did you find? What is the next step?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:42:22,369 ]Then what is the next step, yes sir?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:42:24,539 ]It was… there was something about Jesus. There's something about him. And there's something about God expressed in the Christian Bible that is particularly unique and in the sense of how personable he is. Now people have conversations with him. It's not that that doesn't happen in a lot of religions, but it's very strange that you hear somebody say, hey, the one above all told me this, right? It's more like, oh, you know, you should do this, like Confucius says, you know, the old joke.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:43:02,799 ]Confucius says…

Alex Woollends

[ 00:43:05,449 ]Many jokes on Confucianism. Not to disparage it, there's a lot of truth there too, of course, but you know what I mean. So, I thought, well, how can I trust the goodness that seems to be coming off of the character of Jesus and God.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:43:24,889 ]Yes.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:43:25,559 ]Because I was also studying philosophy of history, and I didn't think that Jesus, the existence of Jesus was like a historical conclusion, if that makes sense. It doesn't mean it didn't happen. It's just, you know, I don't want to split hairs here, but I thought, well, how do I know?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:43:43,579 ]And towards the end of Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott talks about the nature of goodness. And he says the peculiar thing about goodness is that it doesn't belong, quote unquote, to any world of experience. It doesn't belong to a scientific mode of understanding, a practical idea. He calls them platforms of understanding. And he said, so what is that experience of goodness that you get? And he said, well, that's concrete experience because it's unconditioned, unbounded experience. As the ethicist, I think R.M. Hare says, it's overriding. In the sense you could be doing something like scientifically, and doing some horrible experiment on someone and it doesn't matter if you're just focused on the experiment, that inner presence of doing something wrong is still there. It's overriding in a sense that way. So Oakeshott says that is philosophical experience. It just doesn't recognize itself as such, right? You don't recognize it as such as you would say. So long story short, that experience of the good is concrete experience.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:44:48,389 ]And so I could approach, Christianity, God, and Jesus and think, does this seem true? And instead of looking at, say, a historical platform of understanding necessarily or other platforms of understanding, I could look into myself and think about it. If that makes sense. And so it wasn't that I wouldn't look at the historical stuff. It was just that I would look at the historical stuff from the perspective of philosophy, from the perspective of is this true?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:45:24,269 ]How can I put it? It's like if the movie Pinocchio was on the screen and in Pinocchio he was told not to lie, right? I would say that children would still know not to lie because his nose continues to grow. It's you don't even have to tell the children don't lie. You can just show them a little bit of Pinocchio and they get it. They understand because it's framed in a certain way. So, I could look at history with Jesus and look at the Bible, but as Oakeshott says, I wasn't looking at it from the perspective of a historian. I was looking at a perspective of a philosopher, of someone who's trying to find the truth.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:46:02,939 ]And because the truth is something I have cognitive access to, because again, know thyself, then I could trust the truthful voice that was talking to me and just like Pinocchio going, hey look, I can't say don't lie, but look at what's happening, it sure is pointing to that. I don't know if that makes any sense. It was like the truthfulness of him would come out in a concrete way. And, it was something I experienced.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:30,949 ]A historian doesn't tell you what the meaning of Jesus is.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:46:34,219 ]No. Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:35,639 ]What's his message? What is he exemplifying? So you need a religious frame or a philosophical frame in order to understand that.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:46:46,359 ]Yes Absolutely. And that was when...

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:49,589 ]Jesus, anybody you want to name, an Old Testament figure or a figure, you know, from what's the meaning of George Washington? The history tells you what he did and what office he held and so on. But now what's the meaning? What's the proof of George Washington? It's the truth of the situation.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:47:05,809 ]Well, there you rely on things like intuition, you and Gestalt, you take in the whole of the story. You and as you and Oakeshott have put it, if you look at it in a particular frame or platform, and to understand the meaning, that's a different kind of question.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:47:23,759 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:47:24,549 ]Who did what to whom when. Which is what the historian is telling us. So, and so anyway, back to Jesus. Jesus would be an extreme example. George Washington is a simple example, but Jesus has a much more world-shaking meaning than George Washington.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:47:43,979 ]Yes. And what's interesting too is that even if you're, you know, a historical conclusion, you can look at what happened with Jesus and say, okay, well a historian can't make this conclusion, but someone who as Oakeshott would say looks at it from the philosophical perspective about the meaning of it, they can make that conclusion. That's in fact the meaning, well anytime you get into what something means, of course, you're asking a philosophical question. And so ultimately, you're still having to go back into yourself to look at your world and say, does this make sense?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:48:19,669 ]Does this strike me as being true? It again, it still comes back to yourself. Even with the Bible and I think this is a problem Christians have. They pick it up and they go, oh, I've got this. And it's like, well, that right there isn't really worth much unless you're oriented towards the truth and you're trying to read it and ask yourself those questions.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:48:37,569 ]So Yes, Jesus is an example of that. I'm sorry I'm rambling but there's so much stuff that's come together.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:48:44,239 ]All in a in a natural flow of thought. So you've come to think, okay, we got a frame of understanding. You're now looking at Jesus where you're looking at not just philosophy writ large, but bringing it closer to daily life, you might say. One's relation to Jesus, for example, how one uses the lesson or example of Jesus in one's own life. And anyway, what did you do once you'd reached this point?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:49:28,629 ]Once I reached that point I thought, well, does this all make sense?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:49:37,829 ]Mhm

Alex Woollends

[ 00:49:38,879 ]Does this, is this really… I thought, well, the only thing I can do is look and seek for myself, you know, to try to do these things, to see about the truthfulness of what he speaks. It's like a car mechanic tells you you got a problem with your car and you don't take him serious and it breaks down. Well, so I thought, if I'm ultimately going to be the one and I can reliably, I hate to use that word because it sounds like a checklist or something like that, but if I can know that my experience is true then I can see if He is as well.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:50:21,852 ]Right and so then reading Jesus and thinking about God, the question then became: so if you are infinite mind, if you are everywhere, then the next question because this kind of sounds silly, well then where are you? Because, as you read Jesus and you read the Bible, at least for me, I'd come to the conclusion that God was necessary for the existence of reality. This is not like a tacked on entity. He's like, His mind is fundamentally imbued in the nature of reality, this is ultimate mind. When we dream, I guess we dream about going to get a burger or hamburger or something, wake up, oh, that's a nice dream, you know. When God quote unquote dreams, he dreams concrete reality. It's just like literally an idea in His mind in a sense.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:51:16,572 ]So, I thought, well, okay, if I'm investigating Jesus and God, where can I find them in my own personal life? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:51:27,192 ]Where can you find Him?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:51:28,762 ]Where can you find Him? And it was like the question you asked Him in the book. You said, why are You so irritatingly elusive or something you said. And He said something like, you see Me all the time.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:51:40,822 ]Yes, yes.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:51:42,112 ]And I remember reading that and being like, well, where are You now?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:51:45,912 ]Exactly. I looked around.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:51:47,772 ]Yeah, that's how they see it. And I think you said in there I saw some trees and some sky but I didn't really like… that was so funny. Like that's what we do.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:51:57,032 ]We go, okay, if this is an infinite mind, if they are who they say they are, both of them, well, where are they?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:52:05,002 ]And, that was a question of again looking back into myself. When I started looking at my own experiences, I started going, "Well, where is that voice that tells me not to do something and then sometimes whispers that I should? What is the nature of that voice?"

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:52:20,742 ]Mhm

Alex Woollends

[ 00:52:22,232 ]And that's where I kind of got to I think.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:52:28,552 ]You have a voice, so the infinite mind isn't just, you know, like a big metaphysical abstraction.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:52:37,222 ]Right.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:52:37,992 ]But it is connecting with you. presumably not you alone. But in your experience, here is where the connect happens.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:52:49,422 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:52:50,552 ]In your own experience

Alex Woollends

[ 00:52:52,702 ]And my own experience, directly, yes. And that's also another reason why the God book struck me so much is that you said that the experience of God vice versa is actually profoundly mutual. And of course that makes sense, if He's in my experience in such a fundamental way, which He needs to be, being the ground of being literally all of reality, right? Then it makes sense for me to ask myself, well, where in my experience is He? Not where can I find a book where I can find Him, right? In a sense you can, because the book is in your experience too. But, you get what I mean.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:53:30,622 ]It points you to other aspects of your experience as well.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:53:34,912 ]Exactly.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:53:35,492 ]A good book like Oakeshott.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:53:37,772 ]Right.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:53:38,802 ]They do that, they point you to other elements of your experience you might have been overlooking.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:53:43,542 ]Yes. Absolutely, yes. And so that's where I was, that's where I started.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:53:50,502 ]Well, this is probably why religions include spiritual disciplines, prayer, meditation, sometimes things like fasting, you know, ascetic practices, as well as group things, rituals, music, you know, things that inform your experience and help you make that connection, help you take in, in a personal way.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:54:19,332 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:20,222 ]What this great wonderful God, you know that some people say, I've got to pray. How can God be paying attention to my prayer? Well, I think God's really is really uber super duper, you know.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:54:35,812 ]Yes, yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:36,742 ]And can handle all this. In part because, well, we're all part of God and God's part of us as well as God being a kind of partner, you know, capable of bilateral transactional relations.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:50,282 ]And so you can pray in all kinds of ways, and you can get answers to your prayers even, or you can connect in a kind of almost mystical way in meditation where the distance drops away.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:55:06,952 ]And so, is that where if we look at Alex today, is that where Alex is today? And the journey goes on or what?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:55:22,882 ]Yeah, that's a good question.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:55:24,962 ]So, maybe where I'm at today, yes Jerry, I'm trying to discern. It's not that…how can I put this? I've come to the conclusion that He is who He says He is. He exists. Necessarily, He exists. And there have been experiences that I've had too. Mostly the experience with you and especially of course reading the book that made me realize, oh wow, this is actually real.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:56:02,172 ]For all that to be in there when I read it, all the things that I had, you know, learned for my life and had jumped on the shoulders of giants, for all that to be in there was and it's so niche, right? That it was just unbelievable really. It was like literally every other so I thought the odds of this being the case are just so vanishingly small. And then we had a discussion a while ago, you probably don't remember because you talk to a lot of people.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:33,032 ]Ha!

Alex Woollends

[ 00:56:33,832 ]You said, look for synchronicity. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:37,652 ]Oh. Yes

Alex Woollends

[ 00:56:38,332 ]Just like Jung said, and I thought

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:40,062 ]What great category?

Alex Woollends

[ 00:56:41,552 ]Jung’s great.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:42,892 ]Everybody does it a bit.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:56:44,742 ]Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:45,862 ]The atheist, your atheist friend, wouldn't trust it. He would...

Alex Woollends

[ 00:56:49,372 ]No

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:56:50,042 ]But it happens in people's lives where you just got to connect the dots here they are side by side. And what happened with us, you know, synchronicity is coincidences that are meaningful, that aren't just coincidental, but seem to be telling you something.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:57:09,522 ]And that was so many quote-unquote coincidences throughout the book that it was just literally impossible to ignore. It was so profound. And so I thought, okay. So He obviously wants me to do something, I'm guessing. And if this is real, then what does He want me to do?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:57:34,612 ]Yes.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:57:35,592 ]And then the question becomes now on to the next step, I guess is where I'm at right here is, well, this is peculiar, weirdly difficult.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:57:47,312 ]Weirdly difficult.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:57:48,832 ]Yes, yes, it's like, okay, I know you exist. I know you're like probably watching this Zoom meeting for all intents and purposes. Maybe He's doing it through our eyes, but there's a… He's so fundamentally imbued in our experience that it's the next question becomes, okay, I'm listening.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:58:06,282 ]So what do you want from me? What am I supposed to do? We're going all the way back to the beginning where I didn't, as Voegelin said, I didn't have a ground of being under my feet. And my parents couldn't give it to me, bless their hearts, right? They just didn't have the framework for it. And who would know all this stuff anyways? Nobody's going to spend, you know, all this time in their lives to do this. So now that I've found that ground of being, now I'm in the practical world again. The practical platform of understanding is, Oakeshott would say, that the world is a world of action, he says in the book. And it's up to us to meet it, right? So now how do I meet him here?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:58:45,752 ]Mm-hmm.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:58:46,852 ]Then I think that's where I'm at. So I don't have any doubt that what happened to you happened to you, Jerry. In fact, some of the things in there are so incredible, your discussion with Jesus, for example, is such a remarkable thing that I can't even talk about it because it is actually the most moving thing I've ever read in my entire life.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:59:06,602 ]Yeah, it was strange to me.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:59:09,752 ]Yes, yeah, it was.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:59:11,242 ]Jesus actually kissed me.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:59:13,312 ]Yes, yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:59:14,722 ]And I was not a Christian. So it's not as though this fulfilled my dreams or wish fulfillment or something. No, I was quite surprised.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:59:25,612 ]And the thing that you said there, Jerry, and the thing that's so incredible, and this goes back to the concrete reality that we experience, right? When it speaks to us, quote-unquote speaks to us, when you said, as soon as I saw him, I knew who he was.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:59:46,452 ]Yeah, that is strange.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:59:48,492 ]And as soon as…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:59:49,692 ]Doesn't even look like the pictures or anything.

Alex Woollends

[ 00:59:51,892 ]And yes, and it just struck me as unbelievably profound. I just there's so much of that in there too, Jerry, like just the three questions you ask him, right? Can you… the omnipotence, omniscience, you know, and I think you said can you do anything?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:00:14,932 ]Laughter

Alex Woollends

[ 01:00:16,082 ]In the middle

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:00:16,862 ]Each one was kind of a near miss, not quite omniscient, not quite omnipotent.

Alex Woollends

[ 01:00:21,322 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:00:21,832 ]I can do everything I need to do or something like that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:00:28,722 ]And so I found that destabilizing.

Alex Woollends

[ 01:00:31,982 ]Destabilizing and that was the other part of my journey is that kind of scandalously, I had come to the belief that maybe God wasn't perfect. There was something missing. And during this time when I was reading this book my roommate Tanner was discussing about whether or not good was self-effusive. Where it was like it was just going to where God's goodness could be given without anything needed in return.

Alex Woollends

[ 01:01:03,312 ]Is good going to be a seeking good or is it just content with itself? Is it self-effusive? And I thought it came to the conclusion that if He was that way, then there'd be no need for any of us. Like why would He ask us to do things?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:01:17,342 ]Exactly

Alex Woollends

[ 01:01:18,292 ]Why would I just do it, right? And then of course in the book I find out the answer to that and that again hit me like a ton of bricks.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:01:25,862 ]Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was to many one of the most disturbing things I was told that God is moving, you might say, toward perfection.

Alex Woollends

[ 01:01:35,922 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:01:36,492 ]Towards something closer to perfection, but isn't there yet, we're all moving with God and God's moving in part because of the interaction between us.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:01:45,872 ]All, nothing I had ever heard in church or in religious discussion before, but here it was all laid out and I slowly made the way. But one thing I was connecting with God: An Autobiography and your particular journey, Alex, is it's very personal. You end up, it's funny you go all over the whole universe and back again, and it ends up Alex asking, "Okay, there's a God, this vast God,"

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:02:19,622 ]What does God want of me? Which is my daily prayer. What do you want me to do today? You know, and that's how I kind of start the day. And the whole of I think everything I'm told in God: An  Autobiography is extremely personal. I'm obviously reporting my encounter with God, my dialogues with God, which constitute a kind of revelation as long as you put the word in a lower caps, not founding a religion or anything.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:02:53,592 ]But it's what anybody could experience other than the dialogue which I think God had God's own reasons for engaging in with me. But we all connect directly with God. And it all comes down to the personal story: what does God want Alex to do? I mean that's Alex's question. And in a way Alex doesn't have to worry. Do I understand; do I have the exact right conception of God? Well you've got the conception of God that God you've said you might say has led you to.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:03:31,882 ]And so it's the conception of God Alex needs or that will empower God's work through Alex. So I often don't use that term reliable, which you also didn't care for, but I talk a lot about trust.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:03:47,702 ]And developing in radically personal a kind of epistemics of trust that you have to just trust that the way you are working with God, that's real. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:04:02,232 ]And the way God gives you to see the world, the experiences that come your way, may be different from someone else's experiences. You don't trust blindly, that's not what we're saying here, but discernment is always important and you got to keep your own, what I sometimes call a clarified soul. You've got to keep yourself clean, you might say, you know, not having all kinds of ego erupting or other interests. I don't want to upset my, my Catholic grandmother, you know. So, you're coming in what, what really is coming to you is true.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:04:41,512 ]But your journey comes to that key point that I think everyone has to ask themselves, what does God want of me?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:04:55,612 ]And in light of the synchronicities and intuitions and conscience and everything we have, all the input we have available to ourselves, including what loving people tell us about ourselves and so on, that's what it all comes down to. And that's the journey up to this point.

Alex Woollends

[ 01:05:20,452 ]Yes, sir.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:05:21,852 ]That's the journey beyond this point.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:05:25,602 ]Thank you, Alex, for sharing your spiritual story. And it's quite a story. It's fun for me to interview someone with so philosophical mind, you know, I just relate to that so totally that we keep asking all these questions.

Alex Woollends

[ 01:05:40,722 ]Yeah

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:05:41,452 ]Is that true? Why, why, why?

Alex Woollends

[ 01:05:43,702 ]Why, why, why?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 01:05:46,692 ]Okay, certain mentality, and it's not superior to other mentalities, but it's ours. So, I thank you for that and as I say a great pleasure for me. So you be well then.

Alex Woollends

[ 01:06:00,462 ]Yes sir, you too Jerry, take care. God bless.

Scott  Langdon

[ 01:06:25,192 ]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.