Beyond Belief

Jacob Needleman On God Without Religion

I first encountered the work of Jacob Needleman about thirty-five years ago when I read his 1970 book The New Religions, which reviewed the eclectic spiritual landscape that was then just beginning to flower in the West. I had studied a little philosophy in college, but the academic perspective seemed intellectually cold and remote, certainly impossible to apply to the challenges of everyday living. By contrast, Needleman has built his unique writing career as a popular yet erudite philosopher primarily concerned with the great questions: Who are we? What’s going on here? And what is our real purpose in life? The range of his concerns is reflected in the titles of his books since the 1970s, including Lost Christianity, The Way of the Physician, The Heart of Philosophy, Money and the Meaning of Life, The American Soul, Why Can’t We Be Good?, and, most recently, What Is God?

As a journalist I’m indebted to Needleman for a concept he pioneered: “the warmth of real objectivity.” Western science and rationalism have schooled us in the idea that objectivity consists of being dispassionate, if not outright wary and cynical. Needleman suggests instead that real objectivity is suffused with a profound compassion. He writes in What Is God? that leaving the bias of the limited ego-self behind opens us up to the living experience of God — not God as a judgmental deity watching us from a throne in the sky, but God as us:

It is only in and through people, inwardly developed men and women, that God can exist and act in the world of man on earth. Bluntly speaking, the proof for the existence of God is the existence of people who are inhabited by and who manifest God. . . . God needs not just man, but awakened man, in order to act as God in the human world. Without this conscious energy on the earth it may not be possible for divine justice, mercy, or compassion to enter the lives of human beings.

Born in Philadelphia in 1934 and raised by Jewish parents for whom “becoming a doctor was the only human thing to do,” Needleman entered Harvard University with the intention of going on to medical school. But the young student’s obsessions with the big questions of life steered him into the pursuit of philosophy. “My father never understood what I was doing,” Needleman recalls, and his mother didn’t take his decision well either. When he received his PhD from Yale and was first introduced socially as “Dr. Needleman” in her presence, she interrupted to point out, “He’s not the kind of doctor that does anybody any good, you know.”

Needleman has never been the kind of philosopher that an academic is supposed to be, either. Early on he departed from the dry-bones pursuit of argumentative logic and analysis to deal with questions that inexorably cross over into the academically suspect realm of spirituality. At Harvard he was the only student to sign up for an esoteric course on the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, and in ensuing years he studied Zen Buddhism and the other Eastern traditions. He also encountered the teachings of the Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, which remain a touchstone of his perspective.

Needleman has spent more than five decades as a professor at San Francisco State University. The following conversation, focusing on What Is God?, is the fourth time I’ve interviewed Needleman and the third time I’ve interviewed him for The Sun. In an age when the search for spiritual meaning often seems reduced to one pop trend after another, Needleman delivers a wealth of insights with no pedantry or hyperbole. His remarks are always free of sound bites, and he takes the time to answer inquiries with thoughtfulness and an obvious concern for getting closer to the truth. It’s not unusual for a full minute of silence to pass between asking a question and hearing his response. I always get the feeling that he’s referring all inquiries to a higher authority — an authority that animates his face and his voice not with self-righteousness but with an openhearted curiosity that celebrates deeply shared questions rather than final answers.

Miller: What was your first recognition of God?

Needleman: I was eight years old, and it was summer in Philadelphia, a very hot and muggy evening. My father was sitting out on the steps, looking up at the sky, which he often did. He was a quiet man, though sometimes explosive, and I was in awe, and a little frightened of him. Even his silences were strong. We were overlooking the front yard, where he had planted a victory garden during World War ii. There was a big area of weeds around it, which I just loved. It was heaven to me, walking through all that nature. We were on a low-rent street in an otherwise fine area of Philadelphia, close to the Wissahickon Creek, where some of the greatest mystical sects from Germany had settled and established communities. I didn’t know this at the time. I was just sitting there, looking up at the sky, and I was stunned by what I saw. Suddenly there seemed to be a million stars, far more than normal. The whole sky was filled, almost as if you couldn’t see between them. And at that point, when I was trying to figure out what was happening, my father simply said, “That’s God.”

Nothing else passed between us, and I wondered how he knew that I was trying to understand what I was seeing.

Moments like that, and other moments I had as a child in nature, were all I needed to know of God. I was not at all interested in Judaism, the religion of my ancestors. My parents were not religious, but my grandparents were Orthodox and often took me to synagogue. Yet I was completely allergic to that religion and their God; my God was in the trees and the sky.

Miller: Did your awe of your father heighten that moment when you were looking up at the sky together?

Needleman: Oh, no question. He was like God to me in many ways. He was not a highly developed spiritual man, but he did have a yearning that I would call deeply spiritual. He had the soul of a poet; he just couldn’t express it very well.

Miller: How has your experience of God changed through the years?

Needleman: All through my life I’ve experienced a sense of wonder that has to do with something that’s out there but also touches a place within me. It feels as if I’m part of something bigger. Once, when I was in Greece, I went into an Orthodox church and saw an image of Christ up on the ceiling — a giant head of Christ the Creator looking down on me. I felt the same sense that somehow reality or the universe was offering me a gift, but I wasn’t sure how to respond to it.

In the midst of such wonder, all my ordinary concerns, fears, and worries are quieted. The source or trigger for this wonder is always outside: the stars, the face of Christ, the extraordinary beauty of nature, looking at a slide of blood cells. But the experience is inside. What I see out there awakens an impersonal joy within me, as if this wonder is what I really am, rather than being my day-to-day self, which we can call the “ego.” In those moments the ego realizes that everything it always wanted — safety, security, happiness, the ability to give and receive love — is granted by this great thing outside me. Yet it is given to me within. And in that moment the ego submits, because it realizes that this great gift is not of its own making. This gift comes from God, and anyone can have it, without religious trappings.

For a while I led a double life in regard to God. On the one hand, I was a scholar and philosopher, respectful of religion yet fundamentally disbelieving of God. On the other, I had these transcendent experiences in which the word God was not even involved. I would have described them simply as encounters with “higher consciousness.” At some point these two ways of being merged; it was as if the wall between them became a porous membrane. I didn’t become a “believer” in the usual sense, but I recognized that my experiences of wonder were pointing me toward what God is.

Miller: You had an early encounter with the Zen master D.T. Suzuki.

Needleman: As a young person I went to Harvard intending to become a scientist. I considered myself an atheist and existentialist, but I didn’t buy the reductive scientism of the analytic philosophers, who were the leading thinkers of the time — at least, at Harvard. I had a humanistic bent that led me to pursue the great questions of meaning — what are good and evil, life and death? — instead of reducing everything to word problems and logical puzzles. I became a philosophy major and decided that would be my career.

I became preoccupied with the problem of the self: what is it? I was touched by the work of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who was an extraordinarily gifted and sensitive writer, but I tried hard to ignore the Christianity in him. A lot of existentialists did that, taking his deep psychological insights and downplaying the religion — which means they hadn’t really understood him at all. His questioning of the self had a great influence on my undergraduate work. I was fascinated with the problem of the self — understanding its true nature and its relation to the physical body and the world at large. In my senior year I became interested in Zen Buddhism through a series of essays by D.T. Suzuki, a great scholar and practicing master of the tradition. He was the one most responsible for bringing Zen to the West.

But Zen at that time was deeply incomprehensible. These days in many places it’s become so watered down that it’s hardly Zen at all. It’s become a brand, like Satori perfume. People make jokes about koans. It’s sometimes hard to recognize the original tradition anymore. When I first encountered Zen, its incomprehensibility also made it irresistibly attractive. What was this thing that could be so irrational and yet so deep and powerful, so alive with meaning?

In 1957 I heard that Suzuki happened to be visiting New York City, and I was eager to meet him. So it was arranged, and I went to a beautiful apartment where he was staying on the Upper West Side. There was this little man with these incredible eyebrows, like bat wings. And he had such a presence, a real strength of being. He was there in a way I had never experienced. I’m not talking about stage presence or charisma. He had a kind of stillness and quiet attentiveness that energized the atmosphere. When someone like that is in a room, your attention naturally goes to him or her. There’s an attraction that’s not sexual, not egoistic, not flamboyant. There’s something about the person that compels your attention and respect.

Miller: Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, once said that the point of mastering that defensive martial art is to have the capacity to enter a room and quell any conflict without making a single move.

Needleman: Yes, that would be an expression of presence. It means someone emanates authority because of what he or she is, rather than what he or she does, says, or looks like.

I had prepared a question for Suzuki: What is the self? I’d written my undergraduate thesis on the question of the self and gotten a high grade on it, so I felt ready to pick apart his reply. I had Heidegger, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, and all these other philosophers on my side, backing me up.

Suzuki replied, “Who is asking the question?”

Now, in 1957, nobody talked that way. In fact, I was a little angry at his response. What did he mean, who was asking the question? All the philosophy in my head went right out the window, and I answered, “I am! I’m asking the question.”

He replied, “Show me this ‘I.’ ”

Now I was really annoyed. I couldn’t speak. I had no associations, no ideas, nothing to answer with. We were both silent for a while. Then we had some trivial conversation before I got up and left, deeply disappointed and puzzled — shaken, really, and thank God for that.

Had anyone else said, “Show me this ‘I,’ ” I would have thought they were being clever, trying to engage me in an intellectual game, but Suzuki’s presence carried such weight that I couldn’t think. I just couldn’t make any sense of it. I felt a great respect for the man in my gut, but my mind was confounded by him. That’s a very special state to be in. The part of me that could enter philosophical discussions and play the intellectual game was simply not admitted into the room. Here I was in the presence of this man whom I respected not because he was smart or widely published but simply for his being. And he respected me for my being, because that’s what he was calling forth with his challenges. He wasn’t interested in having an intellectual debate with me.

Miller: He was inducing in you the same experience that a Zen koan is meant to induce: stopping the mind.

Needleman: Yes, because to stop the mind within such a context is to touch someone’s being, to touch his or her yearning, the essential need in the person for a relationship to something higher.

Miller: So when Suzuki threw you back on the experience of your own being, you found yourself wordless.

Needleman: Yes. At the point of encountering your own being, you either have to remain silent or start singing. If you’re going to talk about “being” in any meaningful way, you may have to use special language, perhaps mythic language. Myth, in this context, is not falsehood. It’s the language of the heart and mind together, and it surpasses our ordinary way of expressing ourselves. Nature often speaks to us in mythic language. We tend to paper over nature with scientific language and think we’ve fully described it, but to look at nature only in that way is to muzzle it.

Suzuki was not going to give me an intellectual answer; he meant to put me in a questioning state so that I could experience something about the self — what it isn’t, what it could be, and so on. As Kierkegaard said, direct communication between people is not real communication. Real communication is indirect: it allows one to experience something rather than intellectually understand it.

Miller: It seems your father, by looking at the sky and saying, “That’s God,” was pointing you toward an experience rather than explaining what you were seeing.

Needleman: Yes, even if he didn’t know that’s what he was doing. It was an instinct he had. But with Suzuki it was his deliberate way of respecting another person’s spiritual search. He gave me an authentic answer, the importance of which I realized months later. I literally woke up in the middle of the night exclaiming, “So that’s what he meant!” It was my first experience of a real spiritual communication from a master.

Miller: There seem to be many such stories in spiritual literature, where the first thing a master has to say delivers some kind of shock to the student. Instead of having wisdom directly dispensed to you, you’re confronted with your own lack of resources.

Needleman: I can’t say for sure what Suzuki intended; it was a brief encounter, and I didn’t see him again. But the encounter certainly affected me as if he had meant to impart this lesson.

Other times the lesson comes from a source that doesn’t intend to give it. In the Hindu tradition there’s the idea of the upaguru, the “guru next to you.” This means that anything that is happening in your life at the moment can be your teacher, if you have the right attitude.

For instance, this drinking glass sitting here is not my upaguru at the moment. But if I were talking to you about how important it is to have awareness and in the process I absent-mindedly waved my arms and knocked the glass over, then I might become aware of how unconsciously I was behaving while talking about being conscious. In that moment of heightened awareness, the water glass may become my upaguru, but only if I’m willing to pay attention instead of just saying, “Oops!”

That’s a lighthearted example, but there are countless more-serious instances in life where we have the opportunity to recognize and be conscious of what we’re doing and who we really are.

Miller: It reminds me of a Native American shamanic practice called “rock seeing,” in which you pick up a fist-sized rock and stare at it until you see a picture or just get a feeling from the stone that wasn’t there before. Psychologists would probably say that one is projecting the unconscious onto the rock, but I think the Native American perspective is that you’re actually becoming aware of what this bit of nature has to say to you.

Needleman: Yes, it’s the difference between projecting meaning onto a Rorschach blot, which is truly meaningless, and recognizing an inherent meaning in nature, which, from an indigenous perspective, is always speaking to us and yearning to be heard. The typical modern reaction to nature is instead to manipulate it or cover it over with our own artifacts. We’re constantly muting the living presence of nature in our lives.

But if you really give your full attention to nature, it does speak to you. If you’ve ever been out in the woods and suddenly experienced a shock of grief or awe or a sense of belonging to something greater, that’s because nature has spoken to you. That’s why there’s a timeless, universal tradition of experiencing God in nature. It’s one way of recognizing that we’re part of something greater than ourselves.

Personal. Political. Provocative. Subscribe to The Sun and save 55%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE