Needleman - What is God?

Table of Contents

ALSO BY JACOB NEEDLEMAN

Why Cant We Be Good?
The American Soul
Time and the Soul
The Wisdom of Love
Money and the Meaning of Life
The Heart of Philosophy
Lost Christianity
The Way of the Physician
A Sense of the Cosmos
The Indestructible Question
Sorcerers (a novel)
The New Religions
The Essential Marcus Aurelius
The Sword Gnosis (editor)

FOR BENJAMIN AND IDA NEEDLEMAN

Acknowledgments

For this book, more than for any other I have written, I have received help from a great many friends and colleagues at every stage of its writing from its initial conception to its completion. They know who they are and here I want only to make sure they know how deeply grateful I am for their willingness to read what were sometimes only fragmentary pieces and undeveloped lines of thought and narrative. The very fact that throughout the writing of this book so many friends were listening in was a tremendous support, quite apart from their comments and criticism. I cant explain exactly why it was like this, but it was so. I had always believed that writing was fundamentally a solitary craft and no doubt it often is. But in my case, with this book, the steady atmosphere of attention and good will from so many others was from the outset a companionate presence.

That said, I wish to make special mention of the help I received from Roger Lipsey, who went through every page, paragraph and sentence of the first draft with a flaming sword in one hand and a sweet-sounding bell in the other. Both the sword and the bell made my heart glad (and my thought clearer) in equal measure.

I am more and more grateful that Mitch Horowitz remains my editor at Tarcher/Penguin. How has he managed so richly to support my efforts? I am not speaking only of his indispensable affirmation of what I am trying. What I now so clearly see and so deeply appreciate is also his ability to respect the reader with whom I am hoping to communicate and thereby to remind me of my ideals and obligations as a writer living in two worlds.

My wife, Gail: always there, always at my side, always understanding my aim even when I have nearly forgotten it, always wise and unafraid to speak from her conscience to mine. Such love.

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

To think about God is to the human soul what breathing is to the human body.

I say to think about God, not necessarily to believe in Godthat may or may not come later.

I say: to think about God.

I clearly remember the moment something deep inside me started breathing for the first time. Something behind my thoughts and my desires and fears, something behind my self, something behind Jerry, which was and is my name, the name of me, from my earliest childhood.

I can say this now, more than sixty years after my first conscious experience of this second breathing, this first breathing of the soul.

Let me explain.

The year is 1943. I am nine years old.

It is dark night, full summer in Philadelphia, hot, humid. I am aware that my father is sitting outside on the front steps.

We have only just moved into these small rooms on this bare, newly constructed street pretentiously named Park Lane. The street is an island of low-rent apartments in a sea of wealth: leafy streets, large, gracious old housesand all embraced by Philadelphias incomparable Fairmount Park with its stretches of untamed forest and its rushing, mystical Wissahickon Creek.

I go down the thinly carpeted stairs and gingerly open the screen door, trying not to disturb my fathers silence. I had thought to walk up the street into the sweet air of the park entrance. But this time, I dont know why, without a word, I sit down next to my father. I had never done that before. His solitudes were never inviting, often following bursts of anger or simply mysterious and, to me, a child, inexplicable. Always more or less frightening.

I sit down, noticing that his head is tilted toward the sky.

In front of us stretches a vacant lot, part of which my father has cultivated as a victory garden (during World War II the government asked citizens to help the war effort in that way to reduce pressure on the nations food supply). In that garden, now enveloped in darkness, there live corn, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, lettuce, scallions, string beans and much else, planted and unplanted, some of it contained by the wooden fence and some of it rampantly flourishing in the wild lot behind the fence: lowly weeds with frost-green, sticky leaves, white-tufted milk-weed, crowds of dandelions, andto me most important of allbuzzing, brilliant insects, butterflies, some like fluttering snowflakes, others like flying wildflowers and others colored like jungle creatures, all heartbreakingly gentle and beautiful; snails, spiders, big, angry horsefliesand, lord of everything, the pale green praying mantis suddenly appearing out of nowhere in a moment of grace, as from another universe, so near on the leaf, so still, so complex, so seemingly conscious and wondrously deadly. And then, closest to my heart, grasshoppersdancing, leaping, flying, singing grasshoppers, some earnest, some clownish, some as thick as my thumb, others almost as tiny as a crumb of bread in the palm of my hand. It brought tears of wonder and love to my eyes to see the identical intricate structure of this improbable creature written in both the tiniest dot of being and the largest individual member of the species.

Out there, now, occupying the whole of the soft darkness: fireflieswe called them lightning bugs. Hundreds of them, intensifying the darkness by randomly glowing and vanishing in the same present moment; intensifying the silence with their noiseless rhythms of illumination. Like flickering stars they were, here, on earth.

But it was when I looked up into the sky that, at that moment, I appeared. It did not happen right away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that my father was still looking up. And so I kept my gaze upward, noticing the stars, some of which formed into constellations whose names I knew. Imitating my father, I kept my gaze upward, just looking.

And suddenly, incomprehensibly, all at once, despite the heavy summer air that always absorbs most of the starlightsuddenly, as if by magic, the black sky was instantly strewn with millions of stars. Millions of points of light. Millions of worlds. Never, before or since, have I seen such a night sky, not even in remote mountains on clear nights. It was not simply that my eyes had become normally adjusted to the darkness; it was as though an entirely new instrument of seeing had all at once been switched on within me. Or, as it also seemed, as though the whole universe itself suddenly opened its arms to me, saying to me: Yes, I am here. See, this is what I really am! Do you like my beautiful garment?

In an instant, less than an instant, a powerful, neutral current of electricity streaked down both sides of my spineso quickly I had not a moment to have a thought about it or an emotional reaction to it. Many years had to pass before I was able to understand something about what it was that came down through me.

My eyes stayed riveted on the millions of stars, the millions of tiny stars with hardly a black space between them.