In "What is God?" Jacob Needleman writes what properly can be termed a spiritual autobiography. My wife, seeing me write my name in the book after reading the first few pages, remarked that it must be important, and indeed it is in many ways. At the same time it ends in a somewhat disappointing fashion from the point of view of those of us who search--as humans have been doing from the beginning of history at least--in philosophy and religion for new and broad insights into matters of universal and ultimate concern.
Needleman, a Jew by birth and a philosopher by training began his spiritual journey as an atheist who, by an irony of employment, found himself teaching courses in religion. He looks back at his childhood though and recounts a moment in 1943 with his rather unapproachable father in which the two shared a rather noumenal experience of the heavens and during which the father remarks, "That's God." As he looks back at this experience, this sharing, Needleman realizes that there had been two questions in his awareness from that moment and through his years of searching: what is God? and what am I? The questions somehow come to be one question and the answer is one--"I am". For a Jew, and indeed for a Christian, this "I am" recounts the "name" of God given in Exodus 3 and implies an ontology of the whole of reality. The childhood memory is a touching and candid moment in the spiritual development of the author, suggestive of much fertile ground for development, and it was at this point that my name went into the book.
Through Parts One and Two Needleman describes his growing up intellectually and spiritually, his education, and his beginning to teach philosophy and religion, the latter obviously a reluctant task for an atheist. He writes with an honesty and touching connection with his students of a willingness to be open to new ideas and influences. And his experiences, in this retrospective volume, tend to hang on the question of God and the "I am" as on a framework which structures not only the book but his life.
Part Three holds the mature fruit of his spiritual journey in many ways and is probably the core of the book (although Needleman might not agree with me). Here he recounts formative interactions with an older atheist student, a young fundamentalist student, and a particular class during which he and his students together discovered the human emotions which lead from the isolated self to the more universal Self--to the "I am" in a fertile emptying of the small self into something much grander and more compelling. There are valid mystical insights being discussed at this point.
Part Four becomes somewhat disappointing, for me at least, because Needleman, who had experienced the writings of the spiritual teacher Gurdjieff earlier, falls under the influence of this mystic as the one who supplies the final answers to the search, even though Needleman acknowledges that he has not arrived at his own final answers. The "attention" which Gurdjieff teaches probably is not that dissimilar to or alien from the "mindfulness" of the Buddhists or other mystics. I mention the Buddhists in particular because it seems odd that Needleman, who had an incisive encounter with the Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki earlier in life, does not seem to realize at the end that it may be the same search and insight--the exclusive property of neither Gurdjieff nor Zen. This is a somewhat important point because then all the language we use is highly metaphorical: "God" as well as the "I am" work in certain traditions while in other traditions there will be different but equally powerful metaphors, such as the "original face" and the "Buddha nature".
On the whole this is an important and touchingly human book, one recommended for those who find themselves also searching. It probably is not for those who feel they already have found the answers, and that is partly why Part Four is somewhat disappointing--it seems to narrow or even foreclose the search, which is an ongoing and equally valid process in other traditions.
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