An Interview with Jacob Needleman
by D. Patrick Miller
How much of the
deprivation felt by modern Westerners can be summed up by the complaints
"If only I had more time" and "If only I felt more love?"(Throw
in “more money” and you’ve just about got all our habitual wants summed
up.) If philosopher Jacob Needleman is right, we will not find more love
in the personal want ads nor any extra time in a new electronic daybook.
Instead, we must turn these searches in on themselves to ask why
we seek so incessantly for more of such immeasurables. By confronting our
habitual desires and complaints, he suggests, we may pry open the door to
the realm of the inner life — where both time and love reveal themselves
not as problems to be solved but questions to be lived with.
“Such great questions cannot be
answered with the part of the mind that solves problems,”
writes Needleman. “They need to be deeply felt and experienced
long, long before they can begin to be answered.” Yet it
is in the very willingness to deeply feel and long experience
the questions of time and love that we can begin to experience
“enough” of both.
Needleman has been writing skillfully about the riches of the
inner life for many years, bringing a sophisticated but accessible
philosophical perspective to the questions of consciousness, modern
Christianity, medicine, and even money in his best-selling title
Money and the Meaning of Life (Doubleday Currency).
A popular professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University
who has been featured on Bill Moyers’ “World of Ideas”
series, Needleman’s most recent works include A Little
Book on Love (Dell) and Time and the Soul (Doubleday).
In this talk, Jacob Needleman explores some of the connections
between these two great questions of human existence.
We tend to think that both time and
love are elusive or actively evading us. Your books suggest that
we really don’t need to search for either time or love, that
what’s more productive is to examine the search itself.
NEEDLEMAN:
Our relationship to time and love is conditioned by our state
of being — our capacity to simply occupy our life, to be
in touch with our real selves. The degree to which we’re
not in touch with the real self is the degree to which we are
frustrated and driven crazy by lack of time, or find ourselves
turning round and round either searching for or avoiding love
in a way that’s bitter and possibly degrading. The degree
to which we are able to open to the real presence within —
the “I am” or God within — is the degree to which
we begin to have a human relationship to time and love.
It’s that inner relationship that provides us with a center
of gravity, the basis of meaning for everything else. When you
feel a search or hunger for that inner presence, then you have
some basis for a truly human relationship between two people that
doesn’t exist otherwise. To be supporting each other’s
inward search is a basis for love that has not been widely written
about or understood.
You speak of sustained love as “a
mystery in broad daylight.” The most obvious meaning of “sustained”
is “over time.” How is the mystery of love sustained
over time different from the mystery of falling in love?
NEEDLEMAN: When you fall in love, it happens all
by itself. It’s not something you do deliberately, it more
or less happens to you. There’s no resistance from aspects
of yourself that want to go another way; you’re not struggling
or trying to exercise your will or intention. There’s no
reckoning of time, and you’re not aware of anything but the
movement of falling in love.
 We all know from such experiences
of passion that while we are with the person we love, time stands still
as if it doesn’t exist. The sense of time that we’re used to involves
the mind and thinking, and is at the service of fear, planning, and manipulation.
Those aspects of the self are what ordinarily make time into an enemy,
and makes us feel driven. Time re-enters the experience of falling in
love only when fear comes back, when we begin to feel that we must hold
onto the love, and don’t want to let go. Or we start worrying about how
this new love will fit into the rest of our lives. Then time seems to
exert pressure again. But in the midst of the bliss of love, the mind
and its fears has no authority at all.
Sustained love has to do with struggle. The automatic gift of
love that is given to us by nature begins to change by encountering
resistance — where something comes in against it, an inevitability
in any process of life. When resistance appears, intention is
required. People who can’t make it past that point will go
looking for another hit of automatic love; they’ll want to
fall in love over and over again because it doesn’t require
so much work. Because there always comes a point in the real love
relationship when work is required, and that means working against
all the impulses and distractions that we are heir to: other attractions,
jealousy, sense of inadequacy, fear of responsibility, not to
mention dealing with the simple day-to-day matters of life that
can wear us down. These difficulties don’t appear all at
once; they occur over time, and that’s why you must renew
your intention many times to create sustained love.
You’ve written that “the
Self is everything that the ego pretends to be, and the Self has
the time that the ego searches for in vain.” Is it only the
Self that is capable of sustained love, and can the ego only “fall”
in love?
NEEDLEMAN:
No, I think there’s something in between the ego and the
Self. Perhaps we could call it the noble part of the ego, that
knows it has an unaccountable feeling in search of the Self. You
might also call it the emerging soul. If the ego were completely
insensitive, we wouldn’t have a chance because the ego rules
us mostly. But in most of us, the ego at least has a hint that
there’s something like the Self. That part of the ego struggles,
and can have intentional love. The real Self doesn’t struggle,
because its very essence is love and compassion. When that appears
there is no struggle.
In the Buddhist mahayana tradition, compassion appears
all by itself when the ego is overcome. You don’t have to
develop it; it’s part of human nature. In between the worst
parts of the ego and the glory of the Self, there is this intermediate
principle that is searching for completion.
Would you say then that we start falling
out of love when the ego begins looking at its watch?
NEEDLEMAN:
Absolutely.
Every woman knows that when a man starts looking at his watch…
There’s a saying in France that “love can withstand
everything but a busy man.” There are a lot of forces that
can weigh against love, but basically time is the sum of all these
forces; it enters into everything.
In your book about love you introduce
an understanding of the philosophical stance known as Stoicism
that differs from the popular notion that someone who is stoic
is simply unfeeling or not admitting their suffering. How is real
Stoicism related to time and love?
NEEDLEMAN: The basic idea of Stoicism is that we
are essentially one with the great self, or Logos of the universe.
That’s our true nature. We exercise that true nature by the
capacity of the mind to relate consciously to its experiences
— to accept, understand, or receive them without the preferences
of liking or disliking those experiences, or responding with fear
or craving. Nor does a true stoic try to reinterpret experiences,
make them more or less dramatic, or good or bad. The stoic receives
all experiences with an inner quiet.
This brings about a great inner freedom — the freedom of
the person who is not devoured by emotional reactions. That doesn’t
mean he doesn’t have these reactions; it means they don’t
toss him around. It’s very wrong to think of a stoic as not
caring. In fact the true stoic can act in a truly caring way because
he’s less at the service of his own egoistic emotions.
We tend to think that if we are in love we should be devoured
by emotion, or at the very least agitated to a high degree. Doesn’t
passion mean that you can’t live without the other person?
We want that total captivity. We may feel insecure if we don’t
love that way, or don’t feel loved that way. But a stoic
doesn’t love that way.
Perhaps the best popular icon we have for the stoic is the character
Spock from the original Star Trek series. Why is Spock the most
lovable figure from that show, the one who still touches fans
the most? The idea about him was that he had no emotion, but in
fact he had very strong feelings of loyalty, love, and justice.
Captain Kirk was heroic too, but full of bombast and agitated
emotions. And the other characters showed all kinds of neurosis.
But Spock seemed to operate at a higher level, truly living by
what he felt and believed without making a big show of his feelings.
That’s what made him a lasting and beloved icon.
It’s also interesting to remember
that Spock was the bastion of integrity — incapable of lying
or manipulating to achieve his aims, as Captain Kirk often did.
NEEDLEMAN: That’s
right. The stoic literally lives for truth; he feels truth, love,
and loyalty to the core but is not swayed by his own self-interest.
This points up the difference between what might one call “real
feeling” and egoistic emotion. We are so used to egoistic
emotions that we’ve often forgotten what real feeling is
like.
In our culture there’s often
a conflict between the openness of women’s feelings and the
secrecy of men about their feelings, a stance which is often mistaken
for stoicism. But true stoicism is not the same as keeping your
feelings a secret.
NEEDLEMAN: Completely different. A stoic may not
give way to expressing certain emotions, which can make the rest
of us nervous sometimes. But that is because he or she sees the
usefulness — or lack thereof — of expressing a particular
emotion in a given situation. At a high level of development,
a stoic person can feel even a very strong passion or dislike,
but govern its expression to benefit other people and the situation
at hand.
When we refer to things as having
a “timeless” quality, we really mean that their value
will last for a very long time — not that they actually express
the condition of no-time. Is it possible to say what timelessness
is without referring to time?
NEEDLEMAN: Within an experience of timelessness,
the ego-driven mind is awe-struck and may even experience a great
joy. It’s that part of us that calls such an experience “timeless”.
But a timeless consciousness itself doesn’t relate to time
at all. In the section of my book on time called “The Arrival,”
a presence appears that is timeless — and the ego, always
afraid of death, realizes that this presence is what it yearns
to be. When a timeless presence attracts the ego, the ego is calmed;
it is no longer a frightened animal.
Also in the time book, you write about
a novel you are planning, in which a young man meets himself as
an older man. Were you using this as a metaphor for the ego’s
meeting with the Self, that timeless presence? Do we approach
maturity as we gain the capacity to see our inward future —
that is, not what we’ll be actually doing decades from now,
but who we will have become in essence?
NEEDLEMAN: Yes,
and the reverse is also part of maturity. In my story the young man is
inside  the older one, as there is a younger presence within all of us. As we grow
we have a tendency to cover over that eternal youth, but we have to get
exposed to it again, see it again to know who we are. The seer — that
older part of ourselves — has to develop a certain intensity and balance
to confront this younger person, and deal with the shock of what that
person is, with all of his immaturity, poor judgment, and so on.
You tell a wonderful legend about a young
traveler crossing a desert who delays his own destiny to save
a dying man who then tells him, “The desert will reward you.”
Late in his life, the traveler finds himself dying in the desert
— and is rescued by his younger self. The message of this
legend seems to be that we need to find ways to take care of the
person we’re becoming, not just the person we think we are
now.
NEEDLEMAN: Hope
really lies in taking care of our own inner possibilities. If
you don’t take care of that, you’ll end up on the porch
of the old folks’ home feeling bitter. We’re mortal,
we’re going to die, life is short — and because of all
that, we can’t look for all of our meaning in what we’re
doing right now. There is something beyond our mortality and our
circumstances in the finite world that we’re meant to take
care of. If there is not that timeless thing within us,
then it’s a stupid universe after all!
Yet when we look for love — as
in the personals advertising in the newspaper — we look for
people who will suit our preferences, wishes, and circumstances
in the material world. And some people get very specific! Can
you imagine what someone looking for “sustained love”
would write in a personal ad? Or would one simply not advertise?
NEEDLEMAN:
Perhaps one wouldn’t advertise. But if so, one might say
that he or she is looking for a love that’s not devouring,
that supports the search for truth in each other, and that doesn’t
take each other’s delusions too seriously.
You’ve written that “when
we actually feel another’s struggle for inner freedom, we
cannot help but love.” Why?
NEEDLEMAN:
I don’t know why. It’s just an empirical fact to me.
When I see someone struggling for the Self, it touches the same
search and struggle within myself. It’s a relatively rare
kind of love, but not so rare. If you’ve ever witnessed someone
struggling to become more honest and sincere, or to overcome some
weakness, then you know what this kind of love is.
When I was traveling overseas once and found myself without money
or food — and not looking very reputable — I came upon
a woman in her garden and asked her for food. She said, “Are
you really that hungry?” I said yes, and I watched all kinds
of feelings show in her face for a few moments, from fear to compassion.
I could see her struggling, and she finally looked at me and said,
“I have nothing.” Yet somehow I felt great warmth for
her at that moment. Even as she turned me down, I could see her
struggling toward her Self.
That reminds me of something else
you wrote about love: “We seem to expect of the other what
we ourselves could not give.” Do we have a similar expectation
of time — that is, we think we need more time to find a sense
of freedom that we may already be avoiding?
NEEDLEMAN:
It’s a good point; I hadn’t thought of that. The passage
of time itself will not give us what comes only from a certain
inner awareness, and in fact we may use time to avoid that awareness.
Time gives wisdom only if there’s a corresponding inward
activity, an engagement with the processes of self-confrontation
and growth. And time heals, if we let it. Even the most fervent
resentments tend to fade over time, more quickly if we help them
along. Whether we’re speaking of time or a lover, we always
need to question whether we’re asking of the other what we
need to give.
You’ve written that we’re
actually “built for the happiness that comes from the cultivation
of a deeper power of mind and feeling than is offered to us by
the automatic process of emotions.” But isn’t that deeper
kind of happiness pretty rare?
NEEDLEMAN: Anyone
who’s working on themselves, searching for themselves in
an intelligent way, touches this feeling of happiness more and
more often, if only for a moment at a time. So I don’t think
it’s all that rare. It’s just that the culture we’re
in doesn’t know how to help us appreciate such experiences.
In fact life itself gives us this kind of happiness at unexpected
moments — for instance, sometimes in a time of great loss,
you are suddenly touched by a certain strange kind of joy because
you’ve lost the thing you wanted, but then discovered another
kind of freedom that you would never know if you always got what
you wanted.
And what happens to one’s sense
of time in these moments?
NEEDLEMAN: There’s
no fear anymore. Obsession with time always has to do with fear,
and so in these moments of touching a greater freedom we realize
that time is not the enemy. We escape the concept of linear time
and enter cyclical time, in which we realize that time is continually
renewing and giving back to us, not just taking away our youth
or energy in the way that linear time seems to do.
Why do you think the metaphor of “just in time” is
so compelling in our culture? In action and suspense movies, for instance,
the bomb is defused or the code is broken with only seconds to spare —
never a couple minutes or an hour. Why do we have such a strong sense
of a countdown, that we’re only going to avoid catastrophe at the last
second? From the philosophical viewpoint, what happens when “time runs
out”?
NEEDLEMAN: Off the
top of my head I would say that our fear of time running out is
a way of expressing the strength of evil. We have a sense that
evil is equal to good — Moriarty was always as smart as Holmes
— and this results in a major battle within us between these
equal and opposed forces. What happens “just in time”
is the influx of miraculous, reconciling spiritual energy from
above and beyond our inner battlefield.
Of course it’s not really good and evil in traditional religious
terms that are fighting each other; it’s our seeking
for the Self and our own resistance to that seeking.
Left to our own devices, we’d never resolve the battle. It’s
the miracle of spirit coming from out of nowhere that resolves
the inner struggle. When the action hero suddenly knows what to
do, has an intuitive flash about breaking the code or snipping
the right wire on the bomb, that could be taken as a metaphor
for the arrival of spiritual insight. Something comes from another
level — just as the hero is about to give up on saving himself
or the world, the magic of spirit appears. This is what we know
will save us in the nick of time.
D. Patrick Miller
is a leading writer in the “journalism of consciousness,”
reporting in a wide variety of media on contemporary spirituality
and the exploration of consciousness. A contributing editor of
YOGA JOURNAL and
the author of several books, Miller is
a member of the Authors Guild, American Society of Journalists
and Authors, and Publishers Marketing Association. Philosopher
Jacob Needleman has described Miller as “one of the best,
if not the best, interpreters of alternative spirituality for
all those who wish to understand it, rather than laugh at it,
ignore it, or swallow it whole.” Publisher Eric Utne calls
Miller’s writing “consistently clear, interesting, and
quite often wise.” A native of Charlotte, North Carolina,
Miller lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, novelist Laurie
Fox. He is the founder of
Fearless Books.
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