Publisher's Synopsis
In this new book, philosopher Jacob Needleman - whose voice and ideas have done so much to open the West to esoteric and Eastern religious ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - intimately considers humanity's most vital question: What is God? Needleman begins by taking us more than a half century into the past, to his own experience as a brilliant, promising, Ivy educated student of philosophy - atheistic, existential and unwilling to blindly accept childish religiosity. But an unsettling meeting with the venerated Zen teacher, D. T. Suzuki, combined with the sudden need to accept a dreary position teaching the philosophy of religion, forced the young academician to look more closely at the religious ideas he had once thought dead. Within traditional religious texts the scholar discovered a core of esoteric and philosophical ideas, more mature and challenging than anything he had ever associated with Judaism, Christianity and the religions of the East. At the same time, Needleman came to realise - as he shares with the reader - that ideas and words are not enough. Ideas and words, no matter how profound, cannot prevent hatred, arrogance and ultimate despair and cannot prevent our individual lives from descending into violence and illusion. And with this insight, Needleman begins to open the reader to a new kind of understanding: The inner realization that in order to lead the lives we were intended for, the very nature of human experience must change, including the very structure of our perception and indeed the very structure of our minds.
