#Jacob Needleman

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Image: Odilon Redon, Bust of a Man Asleep amid Flowers.

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"To really deepen a question puts you in touch with another part of yourself that your “answers” usually cover over; this is the freedom from the known, that Krishnamurti and others speak about. The great answer is also experienced as a question when a master delivers it to you. The known can be a slave driver.

The other main thing about Socrates is that he was concerned that a man, a woman, a human being needs to know himself—above all needs to take care of what he called the soul, take care of the true self. The first aim anyone should have was what he called “tending the soul.” Unless that’s your main aim, everything else will lead you astray. Those two things are part of where I think this theme, “The Unknown,” is leading. Take care of your true self, your true consciousness and divest yourself from the things you think you know, not only about the world, but about yourself. These two belong together.We dwell in the midst of mystery. Even if our rational mind denies this, we feel it and sense it.

~ Jacob Needleman (in conversation with Richard Whittaker, Oakland CA May 17. 2012: THE GREAT UNKNOWN IS ME, MYSELF, Parabola, Fall 2012.)

[johnesimpson]

Clearing the Clouds from Your Mind

Marcus Aurelius, and a dream account: 'Clearing the Clouds from Your Mind'

[Image: “Combing Through the Cumulonimbus,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)] From whiskey river: 24 Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how often you have received an opportunity from the gods and have not made use of it. By now you ought to realize what cosmos you are a part of, and what divine administrator you owe your existence to, and that an end to your time here has been marked out, and if you do not use this time for clearing the clouds from your mind, it will be gone and so will you.

(Marcus Aurelius, translated by Jacob Needleman and John Piazza [source])

I’m going to do something a little different — okay, a lot different — with this week’s whiskey river Fridays post...

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

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“The struggle to exist, to not disappear in this moment, is the advancing root of the struggle to exist throughout the whole passage of time. We need to help each other in this struggle. You by asking, I by struggling to respond. This is the law of love, which rules the universe.” ― Jacob Needleman, I Am Not I

The Golden Dragon of the Yulong River in Guilin, China | source

[mijnmobielemoleskine]

Among the great questions of the human heart, none is more central than the question, “Who am I?” And among the great answers of the human spirit, none is more central than the experience of “I Am.” In fact, in the course of an intensely lived human life — a normal human life filled with the search for Truth — this question and this answer eventually run parallel to each other, coming closer and closer together until the question becomes the answer and the answer becomes the question.

- Jacob Needleman

[santmat]

Finding Our Spiritual Oasis (Inner Peace, Rest, Tranquility) During This Life -

Escaping the Illusion and Turmoil of the World During This Kali Yuga Age -

Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcast - Sant Mat Satsang Podcasts -

A Satsang Without Walls

By developing a spiritual practice, on demand we are able to find respite from the madness of the world, this turbulent ocean of samsara, gaining our freedom from serving as pawns of a demiurgical, kalistic culture of conflict and agitated minds.

"What our modern world has suffered from most of all is runaway ideology, the agitated attachment to ideas that thereby become the playthings of infrahuman energies. This is the great danger of all ideologies, whether political, religious, or academic." (Jacob Needleman expressing some thoughts about the Gospel of Thomas)

"Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it." (Thomas Merton)

Finding Our Spiritual Oasis (Inner Peace, Rest, Tranquility) During This Life - Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcast @ YouTube: 

https://youtu.be/MOCLDsozAfc

Finding Our Spiritual Oasis (Inner Peace, Rest, Tranquility) - Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcast - Listen and/or Download @:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/spiritualawakeningradio/Finding_Our_Spiritual_Oasis.mp3

@ the Podcast Website With Buttons That Go To All the Popular Podcast APPS - Wherever You Follow Podcasts:

https://SpiritualAwakeningRadio.libsyn.com/finding-our-spiritual-oasis-inner-peace-rest-tranquility-during-this-life

@ Apple Podcasts:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finding-our-spiritual-oasis-inner-peace-rest-tranquility/id1477577384?i=1000631057171

@ Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1HkVKNQsgq4CnfnfuFIrRv

@ Google Podcasts:

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5saWJzeW4uY29tLzIwNzIzNi9yc3M/episode/M2UzN2QwMTEtMWRjOS00MTYyLTkyNDUtYjY2OGMzYzZkZTA0?sa=X&ved=0CCIQz4EHahcKEwj4mcK3---BAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ

& @ Wherever You Subscribe and Follow Podcasts (YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon, Audible, PodBean, Overcast, Jio Saavan, iHeart Radio, Podcast Addict, Gaana, CastBox, etc...):

https://linktr.ee/SpiritualAwakeningRadio

The goal of this Sant Mat Satsang discourse is to shed more light on the meditation practices of the Sants which liberate the soul, provides a spiritual oasis for souls to be free from the agents of the negative power, ever-and-always agitating minds in this world, keeping them off-center so they never get around to going within, finding their true self and exploring the Divine Realms available inside during spiritual practice.

We must rise above during our meditations in order to ultimately return to the Ocean of Love and All-Consciousness known as God... above this bodily existence, above this material plane, above time or KAL, above mind, above maya or illusion and all these outer planes of creation. As it says in the Greek Gospel of Thomas "we enter into Rest." And as Rumi has written in his mystic poetry, To Him We Shall Return.

Meister Eckhart the German Mystic: "If the soul is to see God, then it must see no temporal thing, for as long as the soul is conscious of time or space, or of an idea, it cannot know God."

This discourse is also deliberately mindful of the lineage of Sant Mat Masters spanning many centuries, tracing this Path of the Masters back through time to Satguru Kabir.

References, Subjects, Sources and Segments Include: Rumi, Gospel of Thomas, The Empty Tomb of Satguru Kabir (The Story of Kabir's Body Turning Into Lotus Flowers), Plucking Flowers of Spirituality Within Your Body Through the Meditation Practice of the Sants, The Anurag Sagar (Ocean of Love) and Sant Dharam Das), the Prakash Mani Gita on Inner Sound Meditation, Sat Saheb and Sant Dariya Sahib of Bihar, Sant Tulsi Sahib of Hathras, Maharaj Girdhari Sahib of Lucknow, Swami Ji Maharaj of Agra (Sar Bachan Radhasoami Poetry), Sant Garib Das of the Radhaswami Satsang, Rohilla, Delhi (book of Anmol Vachan), Baba Jaimal Singh of Beas, Hazur Baba Sawan Singh, Baba Somanath, Sant Kirpal Singh, Sant Ji (The Light of Ajaib), and Baba Ram Singh's Satsang Discourse on Kabir and Sant Dharam Das - Anurag Sagar commentary: The Saints are Instructed by The Almighty to Fetch the Troubled Souls. "The Almighty has promised the souls who have left Him and into the world of Kal, that if they are in trouble, or if they remember Him, He shall come to fetch them." (Baba Ram Singh on the liberation of souls during this Kali Yuga age)

In Divine Love (Bhakti), Light, and Sound, At the Feet of the Masters, Radhasoami,

James Bean

Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcasts

Sant Mat Satsang Podcasts

Sant Mat Radhasoami

A Satsang Without Walls

https://www.SpiritualAwakeningRadio.com

#innerpeace #peace #tranquility #relax #breathe #relaxation #rest #spiritualrest #relaxationresponse #gowithinorgowithout #spiritualpodcast #Podcast #SpiritualAwakening #SpiritualAwakeningRadio #Spiritual #Spirituality #GoWithin #Meditate #Meditation #SpiritualPractice #Radhaswami #Radhasoamiji #Radha_Soami #AnuragSagar #Radhasoami #Santmat #Sant_Mat #Satsang #SuratShabdYoga #PathoftheMasters

[stephanspiritual]

From Head To Heart: A Philosopher’s Journey To God | Tom Rapsas

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"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 (via sumballein)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

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"Every human being is both a social self and an embryonic soul. The challenge of life is to support the former while nourishing the latter. It is not easy...

Psychology's healing insights and methods were never intended and never were able to address the "verticality" of the human psyche.

...We are not saints, we are not angels; we are embryonic souls immersed in a badly educated body being pulled along by a love-starved lonely horse called the emotions.

Mankind is called -- to maintain the human reflection of divinity in a world overwhelmed by violence, confusion, and illusion." --Jacob Needleman A Little Book on Love

[via "alive on all channels"]

Marta Bevacqua

[johnesimpson]

"Right Away" Is Not "Now"

Jacob Needleman/John Cleese and Amor Towles: '"Right Away" is not "Now"'

[Video: scenes of New York during the fall months, while Billie Holliday sings “Autumn in New York.” (Lyrics here.) Video assembled by Kevin O’Shea.] From whiskey river: Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar…. I was asking my friend about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the uniqueness of the human…

[eyeoftheheart]

“Man is the microcosm, creation the macrocosm — the unity. All comes from One.”

― The Sufis by Idries Shah

“One of the fundamental tenets of esoteric cosmology is the symbiotic relationship between the macrocosm (the greater universe) and the microcosm (the human psycho-physical organism). In this sense each human being is potentially a miniature universe which contains “all knowledge, measure and number.” Professor Jacob Needleman: “In this form, the idea tells us that the same laws and substances that govern and constitute the stars also govern and constitute the human organism.” In his visionary book The Meeting of Science and Spirit, educator and author John White articulates the profound spiritual implications of awakening to the place of humanity in the cosmic order:

It is said in metaphysics that the human being is the center of the universe. This is not meant egocentrically or astro-physically but rather that each of us is a point of confluence for higher and lower worlds, the visible and the invisible, the mundane and the sublime. Through a mysterious process the universe infolds upon itself to produce the human species that, although finite, is aware of infinity . . . is imperfect but inspires to perfection. The macrocosm produces the microcosm; as above, so below. Each of us is thus a meeting point of the mental and material, consciousness and cosmos, inner and outer space. Every plane of reality, every level of being is contained within us. At the same time, paradoxically, we are contained within them . . . Humanity is involved in a mighty evolutionary drama of awakening to God, to the Creator, to the Great Mystery. A two-way process is at work/play behind that selfdiscovery in which the lower world reaches upward while the higher world reaches downward to encourage the lower to keep reaching. (John White The Meeting of Science and Spirit (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. xiii.)

Throughout history, human beings have drawn correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm, following the Hermetic axiom ‘as above, so below.’ The patterns of human form and structure and of the architecture of the psyche are said to be analogies of cosmic patterns and events: “The objects of the senses are not only symbols of the divine archetypes but are also the manifest bodies of those inner realities. Every element has its source from a higher form, and all things have their common origin from the Word (logos), the Holy Spirit. God is at once both the matter and the form of the universe. His substance is the foundation of all, and all things bear His imprint and are symbols of His Intelligence.””

AS ABOVE SO BELOW (gurdjiefffourthway.org)

[sneepy-snoopy]

Bell Hooks | All About Love | Introduction, Grace: Touched by Love

After breaking up from a partner of fifteen years, Hooks is haunted by the fears that either love doesn’t exist or that she will never be able to see it in her lifetime. The catalyst back to love that Hooks touches on is a brightly colored graffiti declaration she used to walk past daily on her way to work: “the search for love continues even in the face of great odds,” (Hooks, XV). One day the graffiti work is painted an obnoxious and bright white by a construction company so Hooks finds the original artist and he shares snapshots of the work with her. 

Hooks explains that love is rarely discussed - only really in popular culture - and the portrayal people have of love is an awful imitation because it focuses exclusively on messages that love is meaningless and irrelevant. Contemporary popular culture that youths generate and consume is exclusively cynical about love and Hooks believes that this “cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart,” (Hooks, xviii). Comparatively, when Hooks talked about love with older generations they only expressed fear about love, especially surrounding the idea of not feeling loved enough. Attempting to break the silence surrounding love, Hooks has attempted to talk about love with both younger and older generations. When Hooks lectured about ending racism and sexism to youths and explained how a love ethic should be the foundation for social justice movements, the response from the youths was that love is for the naive, the weak, and the hopelessly romantic. When attempting to discuss love with her friends, Hooks was told she should talk to a therapist - they seemed frightened of what could be discovered when exploring the topic of love in daily life. 

Hooks also often discusses the patriarchy’s effect on love often in this book. As a whole, the patriarchy stops people from loving because it promotes male domination over everything and domination and power indifferences cannot exist in a place of real love. Further, Hooks explains men are damaged from the patriarchal idea that they cannot feel emotions strongly (because that is the manly way) and therefore they cannot feel the emotions surrounding love strongly; women are damaged when pursuing love as an idea because then the patriarchy labels them as desperate for a man and on the road to fatal attraction. Hooks explains she has considered the extent to which gender shaped a writer’s perspective on love, and then shows how little literature there is written about love by women. When looking at nonfiction about love, Hooks was surprised to find the majority of the top self-help books were written by men; all her life she had “thought of love as primarily a topic women contemplate with greater intensity and vigor than anybody else on the planet,” (xx). In A Little Book About Love by Jacob Needleman almost all of the major narratives he comments on are written by men, in Hook’s graduate school training in literature only one poet was called a high priestess of love (Elizabeth Barrett Browning). She explains this may be because female analyses on the subject have yet to be taken as seriously as the thoughts and writings of men and because “men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners” so therefore men are going to spend more time writing about love, compared to women who actively practice it. Further, Hooks compares that men write about love because they feel they have received love and therefore have the authority to talk about it; comparatively, women speak from a position of not having received the love they long for. 

This lack of female authors discussing the topic of love shows itself as a problem in many ways: much of the literature men write is about fantasy - about what is imagined to be possible rather than what is real - and so many words of love offered by poets fail when confronted with reality. Further, these male authors remain cemented in belief systems that suggests there are basic and inherent differences between women and men. (The truth is that, although there are differences in the perspectives of men and women there are usually learned characteristics rather than congenital.  

“Profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture,” (Hooks, xxiv). Although Hook’s discussion on love seems bleak, all is not hopeless. Hooks explains we want to know more about love - what it means to love, what we can do in our everyday lives to love and be loved - and gives ways to cultivate it. The main flaw in our pursuit is the belief that everyone will know how to love instinctively, and if not it would be taught by families. Therefore, to create a loving culture, more emphasis should be put on talking more about real, concrete, love and the discussion should come from a more diverse collection of experts.  By gaining a solid definition of what love is, and learning ways to healthily love, we as a culture can more naturally love in our everyday lives. Everyone wants to know love, it’s a natural pursuit that comes with being human, but everyone is afraid of the vulnerability, accountability, and conscious effort needed to understand and express it. However, with a concrete definition and tools on how to properly express love we begin to know love more in both theory and practice and can therefore be more confident in our pursuit. Love has not and can not abandon us, we just need to relearn what this immensely abstract idea is and how it works.

[noosphe-re]

Questioning makes one open, makes one sensitive, makes one humble. We don't suffer from our questions, we suffer from our answers. Most of the mischief in the world comes from people with answers, not from people with questions.

Jacob Needleman

[mijnmobielemoleskine]

The only really good questions are the unanswerable ones.

- Jacob Needleman

[gristfidimill]

We are human beings, beings whose fundamental food is the experience of truth.

Jacob Needleman

[neo-somaliana]

“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, The American Soul : Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders

[salonduthe]

The world is full of symbols.  Everything is a symbol if you're seeking Truth.  Medieval Christianity had a wonderful symbolic vision of nature.  All things the signature of God, and so on.  Beautiful.  Ancient Egypt had a wonderful symbolic vision also.  So did Tibet.  The Sufis in eleventh-century Baghdad.  Fine.  Excellent.  Gone now.  But it doesn't matter. Mankind moves on.  Now we have science and there is an infinity of new symbols waiting to be seen and felt.  If there's a search for contact with the higher level in man and a sense of man's nature as embracing the two worlds, the two directions, the entire world that modern science reveals will take on symbolic meanings.  The entire world of things will become a world of reminders.  Because things are intrinsically symbolic; you simply cannot escape that.  Things are the creation of two forces confronting each other under varying conditions of universal nature.  And a symbol is just that - the representation of the meeting of two forces under the aegis of a dynamic third force, a mysterious bridge or catalyst.

Jacob Needleman, from Money and the Meaning of Life, Doubleday, 1991)