Jacob Needleman, The Wisdom of Love
JACOB NEEDLEMAN: Love, Play, Essence & Eternity
Jacob Needleman came to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in 1996 to introduce his book A Little Book of Love. The talk was recorded and transcribed. An edited text is presented here. In 2005, the book was re-published as The Wisdom of Love.Who can deny that our world is starved for a new understanding of love, of what it means to live together and work at love and not give up? Philosopher Jacob Needleman always tackles the issues that have a significant impact on our lives. In The Wisdom of Love: Toward a Shared Inner Life (127 pp.), he ponders the question that causes us so much happiness or misery: After the joy of “falling in love,” why is it that, sooner or later, most of us seem to “fall out” as well? Needleman, offers a new interpretation of love’s purpose and it's value. By searching for the sacred with our lover we might well find the divine within them. Philosopher and teacher, Jacob Needleman, suggests love can be a reflection of our spiritual being. He asserts that by the time "we are living together something beyond passion is required" something intentional and conscious is needed.
“ We think we can play with love, but, we are mistaken. Love plays with us.”
--Jacob Needleman
“Who has not been humbled by love, by its joys and its sorrows? How many of us try again and again to lay hold of what love seems to promise, only to be thrown back in fear or confusion or pain? How many give up and sadly accept to outside the drama of love? . . . Whatever the meaning of our lives may be, it has to involve love. But what kind of love? Almost all the myths and legends and stories that teach us about love deal with the force that brings us together, in passion. And then – leads us into what?”
--Jacob Needleman
What follows is a abridged text of his presentation.
Jacob Needleman:
What I've been attempting in my life’s work is to try to discover a bridge between the great wisdom traditions of the world and the problems, difficulties and situations of our everyday life in today's world. I spent many years of my professional life studying philosophy and what you might call the “perennial wisdom”, the one truth that I feel lies at the heart of all the spiritual traditions and philosophies of the world. The question always has been how to lead a life that is guided or informed by these great ideas or great traditions. In philosophy, academically speaking, there are three main questions. One of them is metaphysics-- the question of what is real. Another is epistemology, which asks the question, what can we know? And the third, which has a more common name, is ethics-- which pertains to the question, how should we live? What should we do? And the great wisdom traditions of the world have a very definite vision. They connect these three questions in a way that academic philosophy overlooks, and they relate them to the real issues we face in our lives. The vision that the ancient traditions have given us is a complete, all-encompassing universal order, in which reality is a great organism with a mind and a body and many connections and layers in between. This vision of reality is very different from our scientistic vision, which is more of a horizontal view, and it also touches us in our instinctive or intuitive feeling that there is a vertical order as well. Nobody can look at the universe that is revealed by one of the great theological or spiritual instruments of the modern era -- the Hubbell telescope -- without getting a sense of this great vision.
The Hubbell scientists focus on just a tiny centimeter in what is otherwise looks like an unoccupied, black part of the sky. But they end up with this stunning picture of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of brilliant points, which were not stars, but galaxies. This shows a universe of fecundity, creativity and order, in front of which one must inevitably bow one's head. This vision of a vast organic whole which is vertically and horizontally immense, is at the heart of the ancient teachings. The second great question of philosophy is, what can we know about it? And that requires an understanding that we cannot know the great ultimate nature of the universe unless we do so with something in ourselves that is as hidden as the universal order that is hidden from us. We cannot know the deep truths of the universe with the surface parts of the human mind, no matter how brilliant and how cleverly it operates. So, the idea of what is known and what can we know is connected to the vision of human nature provided by the great traditions, which says that within us there is an immense, untapped, unknown source of knowing, understanding and vision. And furthermore, if we fail to come in touch with that element within ourselves which our structure is built to manifest, we can never know real happiness or meaning in our life. There is an immense reality of consciousness within ourselves along with -- and this is an extremely interesting and somewhat more revolutionary idea -- the instrument by which the human being can actually see and perceive objective value in the external and in the relational world. The idea that there is an objective good and an objective bad and an objective beauty that's out there -- just as much as the universe of stars and planets is out there -- that teaching is brought to us by this ancient reading. But we cannot know it unless we come in touch with the instrument of knowing it, which is feeling of a very refined sort.
So, the heart is known for feeling what is good and the mind for knowing what is true. And, the reason we have a moral relativism in this culture is because people are trying to make moral judgments with the part of the mind that cannot fully feel the truth of good and evil.
There are all kinds of reasons why people come together. They are drawn together, of course, by sexual, emotional, cultural, economic and intellectual attractions, or sometimes just by chance. But, the idea of two people living together who are searching for their spiritual essence has not been widely discussed. In fact, this nurturing support for each other's search -- not necessarily in any overt actions-- could be the force that has been missing in all our attempts to live together and help and love each other. So, I wrote The Wisdom of Love, to open that dimension of the question of human relationships
I start the book with an old legend from Ovid, Baucis and Philemon. It's about two people who are very old and living together very modestly as husband and wife, for many, many years. They represent enduring love which doesn't mean boring, but something else -- another kind of light. The story ends with the beautiful image of them turning into trees that embrace each other. As they begin to turn into wood and the leaves start coming out, they say goodbye to each other. But, the story actually ends with Ovid writing -- which to me, is the most, very important part -- “Whom the gods love are gods themselves and those who have worshipped should be worshipped too.” The story thus ends by pointing to the real meaning of the transformation of the two lovers. When the ancient wisdom speaks of mortals becoming gods, it is telling us about the birth of a new and higher self, or soul, within ourselves. It is this inner birth that has been served by the marriage of Baucis and Philemon. And you will find that sort of mythic symbology throughout the book.
I start the second chapter with a sentence that chose me. We think we can play with love, but, we are mistaken. Love plays with us. And that, I tell you, is the one thing I'm sure of in this world. It is far more powerful than we are and at first we seem to be fitting love into our lives, this is only love's way of smiling at us as we are drawn into its thrall. Naively, ecstatically, we cross the bridge that love lays down for us and soon enough, we are fighting for our lives. What can guide us after love has set us on fire and we have reentered the world of time and mundane life? . . . This book is about the meaning of sustained love. . .What is the deeper purpose of living together within the embrace of love? It is an urgent question for our culture and our time.
The thesis of this book can be stated quite simply, though it will be no simple matter to draw out its implications. The point is that we human beings are in search of meaning, in search of ourselves. Very little of what we already are and already have brings us deeper meaning or happiness. We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning. And we are born as well for suffering, not for suffering that leads to madness, but to suffering that leads to joy-- the struggle with ourselves and our illusions. We are born to overcome ourselves and through that overcoming, to find an inner condition of great harmony and being. We are born for that; we are not yet that. We are searchers and that is the essence of our present humanness. And in love, we have the possibility and the need to help each other search.
Now, I'd like to read from another part, a few pages. The chapter is “Why Do We Quarrel?”
Can we begin by acknowledging that this is an unavoidable aspect of human life together? It is not something that is going to go away. It is not going to be dissolved as psychological insights or philosophical wisdom. Quarreling is here to stay. Emotional reactions are part of human nature. . . What is an issue is neither the existence of these reactions nor the pain that they bring. What is at issue is something else, something rather subtle and actually unknown to modern psychology. . . And the answer that comes to us from every great inner teaching is that there is something in ourselves that can be freed from these emotions. There is a capacity of the mind that can step back from them, a capacity of consciousness, to exist independently of the egoistic emotions. The manner of approaching this capacity and of developing it differs in different traditions, as does the terminology used to characterize emotional reactions. . . At the core of the great spiritual traditions of the world, however, we are advised not to seek to destroy these emotional reactions, but, to allow their existence within the light of our free awareness. There is a long and difficult discipline here, an art of intentionally relating to our emotions without, on the one hand, seeking to suppress them, or on the other hand, indulging in their expression. . . The first step involves the cultivation of an attitude toward the emotion that is not common in our society, namely, that they are not ourselves, that they are processes which need not have the authority in our lives that we usually give them. . . In fact, the stoic teaching, if looked at carefully, tells us that it is actually through separating from these emotional reactions that we begin to approach the real power of the mind, not only to see clearly but to love truly, to care truly, and even in a sense, to hate truly-- that is to “hate” what is truly evil and not merely what goes against our subjective desires or which provokes our subjective fears. . . Silently, or perhaps sometimes in words, but not too many words, you and I understand that before everything else, we are human beings in search of our Self.
Do you have any questions?
Question: What gets in the way of love and true acceptance? What is one’s work? If loving is choosing to work on the positive aspects rather than the negative, where inherent in that is the work?
JN: Well, for example, let's look at what is the work of sacrificing your engagement or your involvement with your own reaction in order to open your attention and your heart to the other person's needs and reality. Isn't there a kind of little sacrifice that takes place, which feels very big at the time? I'm not saying that you're doing something noble. I'm just saying that the work of listening, for example, is a good model of the work of love.
Nature is encrusted with something called ego. I think I'm listening to you, but, in fact, scientific observation would show that I'm probably listening to you one-third of the time, and two-thirds of the time I'm listening to my own thoughts.
Question: Maybe a goal to strive for is to try to listen without your own perspective, to truly listen. But, what is wrong with having one's own perspective? I mean, maybe the whole point is to understand their perspective with your perspective added on. Let's call it listening with appreciation, because you are appreciating that which the other is saying.
JN: There are degrees of paying attention, and while ultimately we may not reach a state of pure listening, we can at least be better at it. Sometimes you'll find that somebody greatly appreciates what you said -- except, it isn't what you said! And often, we hear someone say, “I love what you just said about rabbits,” when actually we were speaking about something else.
Question: How do you know whether or not somebody was really listening?
JN: I don't think there's much doubt when you really hear another person. I think you also know when you're not listening to a person. When someone is really listening, even if they don't know what to say to you, you feel it; you were received. The value is in the experience, not in the description of it. With certain things, you never need to ask “why.” The meaning of life, whatever it may be, is not something where you say, “Now I know why.” It appears as a reality. That's where the philosopher just drops out.
I was once visiting a very interesting man in England who was a Russian Orthodox Archbishop. In Orthodox churches, when you see the image of Christ on the ceiling, you get the impression that this is really the cosmic Christ, and that the whole of the universe and all of human life is based on some kind of gift or sacrifice to reality. So, I asked the Archbishop, what could a human being do to respond to this gift of love, which is cosmic, so overwhelming beyond anything? He gave me a very beautiful answer. I only half expected it, but when I heard it, it made such a great difference. He said, “You're asking what is the response to the gift of love? Well, what is the response to any gift? What is the true response to any gift?” And the answer came, practically from my own lips, but he said, “To receive it.” At first I felt the response would be something I had to do. But he said, “No, the response to love is to receive it. The response to a gift is to receive it.” All spiritual discipline is really a way of creating in ourselves the possibility of receiving the gift, and two people can help each other, one way or the other, to do so. That is one of the rules of love that my book is trying to present So, I will end with that.
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