Jacob Needleman's theology/philosopy was introduced to me by a favourite professor, Dr. Astrid O'Brien, while studying in New York's Jesuit Fordham University.
- I used select pieces of Neeleman's wisdom when teaching adult students in my weekly Bible studies in Moscow, Russia and Kiev, Ukraine 1991-95 while serving as a Salvation Army officer (pastor and church planter)
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In
the present debates both sides tend to treat God as a purely external entity
accessible only by faith—faith defined as belief unsupported by evidence or
logic. My book presents the idea of God as representing a conscious force
within the human psyche which is accessible through careful inner
self-examination. The process of inner self-examination brings about a
knowledge that is as rigorous and supported by evidence as anything science has
to offer. At the same time, this point of view redefines faith as a knowledge
that is attained not only by intellectual means, but also through the rigorous
development of the emotional side of the human psyche. Such emotional knowledge
is unknown to the isolated intellect and has therefore been mistakenly labeled
as “irrational.”
This
“new” idea of God proposes that all the characteristics traditionally
attributed to the purely external God are, in an important sense, attributes of
this inner force of consciousness. When this inner energy of higher
consciousness is experienced, it then becomes clear that such an energy
permeates the entire universe. In this way, it is through self-knowledge that
the existence of an external God is verified and understood.
Q: You were once an
atheist. Can you pinpoint a particular time or event that caused you to
re-evaluate your beliefs?
A:
When I started my career as a professor of philosophy I was required to teach a
course in the history of Western religious thought—much against my
existentialist and atheistic inclinations. In order to teach this course, I had
to do a great deal of research in the writings within the Judaic and Christian
traditions and I was astonished to find in those writings philosophical thought
of great power and sophistication. These writings completely blew away all my
opinions about what I had taken to be the irrationality or immaturity of
religious ideas, opinions which were and still are fashionable in many
intellectual and literary circles today.
But
even so, somewhere in myself, I was still unconvinced—down deep I was still an
atheist when it came to my personal, intimate feelings. It was only when I
embarked on a personal work of guided self-examination that I experienced a
glimpse of a reality that could be called “God.” As my personal explorations continued,
I experienced this quality of inner reality more and more and could no longer
doubt that the meaning of God lay in this direction. At the same time, these
undeniable experiences lit up and were in turn illuminated by all the
philosophical and historical knowledge I had by then amassed and I began to
understand in an entirely new way the teachings of both Judaism and
Christianity as well as the teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. I was
again astonished that nothing of this understanding seemed to be in all that I
had heard about religion and God when I was growing up and when I was being
educated in some of the best universities in America.
Q: What spiritual or
philosophical ideas did you encounter that made you reconsider the teachings of
Judeo-Christian and Eastern religions?
A:
There were very many such ideas, far too numerous to mention. Here are
just
a few:
–
The idea that God needs man (Judaism) as a uniquely free being who is yet at
the same time under supreme obligation.
–
The idea that scripture is deeply allegorical and symbolic, with many levels of
highly sophisticated philosophical and psychological meanings. Many of my
atheistic leanings were due to my literal interpretation of scripture, which,
in numerous places paints a horrific picture of a presumed just and loving God.
–
The idea that Jesus Christ was a highly developed human being who was a great
teacher and that the idea that he was also God needs to be taken in a much more
nuanced way than was commonly presented. In Judaism, for example, a highly
spiritual human being was often referred to as “son of God,” without thereby
implying he was God Himself in the form of a human being.
–
The idea that there exists such a thing as genuine mystical experience (as
opposed to many self-deceiving claims throughout history) and that these
experiences really validate through direct evidence the fundamental teachings
of religion.
–
The idea that all authentic religions, Western and Eastern and throughout the
whole world and human history, converge in genuine mystical experience (which
may also be called higher states of consciousness). The differences between
religions are only differences involving the pathways that lead toward the
practice of directly experiencing higher levels of perception and
understanding. All religions are paths to a metaphorical mountain-top variously
named Wisdom, enlightenment, self-realization, the kingdom of heaven,
righteousness, etc. Differences that lead to violence and persecution are based
on a corrupted relationship to the teachings and practices of religion.
Almost
all of us have had experiences during our life when we sense with great clarity
and power a tremendously heightened state of presence, of being there, an
immediate and unforgettable sensation of I am.
Q: You believe that
atheists and believers alike have been visited by an inner experience that
points to the existence of God. Can you describe or explain this experience,
and why it is that so many don’t recognize it as significant?
A:
Almost all of us have had experiences during our life when we sense with great
clarity and power a tremendously heightened state of presence, of being there,
an immediate and unforgettable sensation of I am. Perhaps it is a moment of
great danger or even impending death, or a moment in a strange place or foreign
country, or a moment of indescribable joy or a moment with no apparent cause at
all when suddenly we are stopped within ourself and feel our sense of identity
more intensely, calmly and purely than anything our everyday life has to offer.
Such moments occur more frequently, perhaps, in childhood. These are the only
times in one’s life that we actually remember; all the rest of our life being
much more cloudy and merely inferred. But the great moments of pure presence
are vividly etched in our memory as though they happened yesterday.
Our
culture does not know how to interpret these moments, these experiences. Maybe
they are called “peak experiences” or “mystic moments” or “breakthroughs”—we
lack any precise words for them. In fact, they are, so to say, “messages” from
our genuine Self as though saying to us: “I am You. Let me into your life.”
The
work of cultivating such experiences until they become more accessible is part
of the essential nature of genuine spiritual discipline. These are moments, at
the very least, of approaching the experiential verification that there does
exist something Higher within and perhaps also outside of ourselves. Moments at
the very least of approaching what the religions call God.
Q: How does our present
confusion about the concept of God reflect a widespread psychological or
spiritual starvation? How would you guide someone who is confused about the
concept of God?
A:
Every human being is born with an intrinsic yearning to understand, to contact
and, eventually, to serve something higher in ourselves and in the universe.
Plato calls this yearning eros. It defines us as human beings—even more than
our biological nature, our social conditioning or our ordinary reasoning capacity.
Our modern world-view tragically misperceives and wrongly defines what it is to
be human. We are conditioned by our society to believe happiness comes from
pleasure, or from getting things or power over people or money or fame or even
health and survival. None of these sometimes very good things can bring
ultimate meaning to our lives. We are born to be deeply conscious, inwardly
free and deeply capable of love. The longing for these things is the definition
of what it means to be human. At the present moment in our culture this
yearning for meaning and consciousness, this yearning to give and serve
something higher than ourselves, is breaking through the hard crust of our
widespread cultural materialism and pseudo-scientific underestimation of what a
human being is meant to be together with an equally tragic overestimation of
what we human beings are capable of in our present everyday state of being. The
intensity of the present confusion about the nature and existence of God is a
symptom of this yearning within the whole of our modern culture.
As
to how I would guide someone who is confused about the idea of God, I would
suggest that he or she begins identifying what one might called “philosophical
friends,”—people with whom one could seriously examine our thought about God
through listening to each other, reading important and useful books together
and trying to think for oneself while familiarizing oneself with the ideas of
some of the world’s great thinkers. Cultivate openness without gullibility and skepticism
without cynicism.
And,
as soon as possible, be on the lookout for someone whose whole manner of
speaking and being makes, as it were, a “sound” that draws your mind and heart.
And then, little by little, try to see if that person can be of real help on
the way to genuine self-knowledge and insight about what God is and is not. In
this realm, more than any other even, the paradoxical marriage of both openness
and scepticism is essential.
Jacob
Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.
He
was educated in philosophy at Harvard, Yale and the University of Freiburg,
Germany. He has also served as Research Associate at the Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research, as a Research Fellow at Union Theological Seminary, as
Adjunct Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of California Medical
School and as guest Professor of Religious Studies at the Sorbonne, Paris
(1992).
