Jacob Needleman Quotes

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All quotes by Jacob Needleman: Culture Teaching more...
  • 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.

    Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com
  • We lose our time because we lose our attention

  • Frederick Franck is one of a rare and precious breed—an authentic troubadour whose lyricism is pure in word and image. He quietly roams our materialistic world and shows us that even here, even now, there is hope for our soul.

  • Real inquiry is a tremendous moral transforming force. It's not just questioning and looking for a quick answer or explanation, but the process of inquiry-of questioning, of opening-opens something in the human being which has not been touched in our culture. Everybody who is human has in themselves the potential of passionate inquiry after truth, and that's the transforming force.

    Real   Culture   Inquiry  
  • For the growing number of people seeking to approach the ideas of Gurdjieff, Toward Awakening by Jean Vaysse offers reliable guidance, as well as evidence of the continuing vitality of this remarkable teaching. It may be counted as among the small handful of books that communicate something of what Gurdjieff brought.

    Book   Teaching   Ideas  
  • What is [the role of money] in the search for meaning? Is our relationship to it one of the chief factors that keeps us in our prison, or could it also be a tool for breaking out, for awakening to a life filled with intensity of purpose?

    Roles   Tools   Purpose  
  • We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning.

    Pleasure   Born  
    Jacob Needleman (1996). “A Little Book on Love”, Doubleday
  • Any serious man or woman in search of spiritual ideas will find a surprising challenge and an authentic source of inspiration and intellectual nourishment in the writings of Paul Brunton.

  • To love my neighbor is to assist the arising and unfolding in him of that which can harmonize the real elements of his nature.

    Love   Real   Elements  
  • When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.

    Jacob Needleman (2009). “What Is God?”, p.18, Penguin
  • Faith cannot be shaken, it is the result of being shaken.

    Results  
    Jacob Needleman (2009). “The New Religions”, p.183, Penguin
  • What is it that makes all of us end each day with the sense that we have not lived our time, but have been lived, used by what we do?

    Each Day   Used   Ends  
  • Money is like a mirror to our culture. What we see tells us who we are.

  • We are human beings, beings whose fundamental food is the experience of truth.

  • In order to teach a course in the history of Western religious thought, 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.

    Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com
  • To be totally engaged with all my functions and all my faculties and all my capacities in life to me that would be success.

  • Life is not so much defined by the external situation as it is by the internal one.

  • 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.

    Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com
  • What is most necessary for people and what is given us in great abundance, are experiences, especially experiences of the forces within us. This is our most essential food, our most essential wealth. If we consciously receive all this abundance, the universe will pour into us what is called life in Judaism, spirit in Christianity, light in Islam, power in Taoism.

    Light   People   Taoism  
  • The work of cultivating experiences called "peak experiences" or "mystic moments" or "breakthroughs" 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.

    Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com
  • Death is the great equalizer. I've seen that phenomenon many times. I've had people in my classes come to me, men and women over 50 years old, and they say, "I made it, I'm rich. But what the hell is my life for?"

    Men   Years   Class  
  • 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.

    Real   Heart   Mind  
    Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com
  • Our world, so we see and hear on all sides, is drowning in materialism, commercialism, consumerism. But the problem is not really there. What we ordinarily speak of as materialism is a result, not a cause. The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and the outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.

    Jacob Needleman (2003). “The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders”, p.16, Penguin
  • The problem of money dogs our steps throughout the whole of our lives, exerting a pressure that, in its way, is as powerful and insistent as any other problem of human existence. And it haunts the spiritual search as well.

  • Man must have results, real results, in his inner and outer life. I do not mean the results which modern people strive after in their attempts at self-development. These are not results, but only rearrangements of psychic material, a process the Buddhists call 'samsara' and which our Holy Bible calls 'dust'.

    Buddhist   Real   Mean  
  • If the group is an art form of the future, then convening groups is an artistry we must cultivate to fully harvest the promise of the future.

    Art   Promise   Groups  
  • 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.

    Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com
  • 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.

    Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com
  • God acts in history: that is, God provides ideas, methods, and experiences intended to bring comprehension to man, an understanding heart, a conscious life.

    Heart   Men   Ideas  
  • Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left? We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance. The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life.

    Life   Time   Philosophy  
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    Jacob Needleman quotes about: Culture Teaching