Quotes by Jacob Needleman - Page 1

We lose our time because we lose our attention
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Time
Attention
Our Time
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Faith cannot be shaken, it is the result of being shaken.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
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The only really interesting questions are the unanswerable ones.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Interesting
Really Interesting
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Money is like a mirror to our culture. What we see tells us who we are.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Culture
Mirrors
Who We Are
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We are human beings, beings whose fundamental food is the experience of truth.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Fundamentals
Human Beings
Humans
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When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Civilization
Race
Racing
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Life is not so much defined by the external situation as it is by the internal one.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Life
Internals
Situation
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We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Born
Pleasure
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To be totally engaged with all my functions and all my faculties and all my capacities in life to me that would be success.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Capacity
Celebration
Would Be
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To love my neighbor is to assist the arising and unfolding in him of that which can harmonize the real elements of his nature.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Love
Elements
Real
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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?
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Each Day
Ends
Used
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Art
Groups
Promise
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God acts in history: that is, God provides ideas, methods, and experiences intended to bring comprehension to man, an understanding heart, a conscious life.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Men
Heart
Ideas
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Inspiration
Spiritual
Writing
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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?"
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Men
Class
Years
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Dog
Powerful
Spiritual
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Materialistic
Soul
World
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If one steps out on a starry night and observes one's inner state, one asks if one could hate or be overwhelmed by envy or resentment. ... Is it not true that no man or woman has ever committed a crime while in a state of wonder?
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Men
Hate
Night
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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?
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Purpose
Roles
Tools
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To search means, first, I need Being, Truth; second, I do not know where to find it; and third, an action takes place that is not based on fantasies of certainty— while at the same time a waiting takes place that is rooted not in wishful thinking but in a deep sense of urgency.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Mean
Thinking
Waiting
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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'.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Buddhist
Mean
Real
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Book
Ideas
Teaching
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Experience
Light
People
Taoism
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Life
Time
Philosophy
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Culture
Inquiry
Real
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Heart
Mind
Real
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Consciousness
Energy
Important
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Discipline
Moments
Spiritual
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The process of inner self-examination brings about a knowledge that is as rigorous and supported by evidence as anything science has to offer. At the same time, this point of view redefines faith as a knowledge that is attained not only by intellectual means, but also through the rigorous development of the emotional side of the human psyche. Such emotional knowledge is unknown to the isolated intellect and has therefore been mistakenly labeled as "irrational."
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Emotional
Intellectual
Mean
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The differences between religions are only differences involving the pathways that lead toward the practice of directly experiencing higher levels of perception and understanding. All religions are paths to a metaphorical mountain-top variously named Wisdom, enlightenment, self-realization, the kingdom of heaven, righteousness, etc. Differences that lead to violence and persecution are based on a corrupted relationship to the teachings and practices of religion.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Heaven
Teaching
Understanding
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Buddhism
Philosophical
Teaching
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Our modern world-view tragically misperceives and wrongly defines what it is to be human. We are conditioned by our society to believe happiness comes from pleasure, or from getting things or power over people or money or fame or even health and survival. None of these sometimes very good things can bring ultimate meaning to our lives. We are born to be deeply conscious, inwardly free and deeply capable of love. The longing for these things is the definition of what it means to be human.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Believe
Mean
People
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Book
Confused
Philosophical
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Christian
Philosophical
Religious
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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 / Philosopher
Essence
Ideas
Our World
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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.
Jacob Needleman / Philosopher
Confusion
Everyday
Giving
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