FEATURES INDEX • BOOKS • LITERARY SERVICES
APPEARANCES • JOIN MAILING LIST • CONTACT • LINKS
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. A popular professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University who has been featured on Bill Moyers’ “World of Ideas” series, Needleman’s works include The Wisdom of Love and Time and the Soul. 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 traveller 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 traveller 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 travelling 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.
For another talk with Jacob Needleman on
“Making Sense of Mysticsm,” see Sense & Spirituality Reports.
Copyright 1999 by D. Patrick Miller. All rights reserved.
To receive notice of every new FeatureLine article, join the free Fearless News mailing list.MORE BOOKS FROM JACOB NEEDLEMAN:
C L I C K T
O :
FEATURE INDEX • Fearless
HOME • BOOKS from Fearless
