Buku separa outobiografi akan pencarian Tuhan oleh seorang bekas atheis yang bergelar professor dalam bidang falsafah. Yang akan kita temui ialah pencarian itu pada akhirnya akan mengetemukan beliau akan Tuhan yang hadir bukan dalam bentuk agama tetapi sesuatu yang lebih mendekati pegangan sufi melalui penerimaan beliau bahawa Tuhan tidak akan mampu dicapai menggunakan akal semata-mata.

Walaupun saya tidak dapat memahami semua apa yang cuba dibincang dan diperjelaskan oleh beliau, namun sekurang-kurangnya pembacaan ini menunjukkan betapa watak-watak intelektual barat tidak lagi dapat bersembunyi dalam kepompong sains bagi menidakkan keperluan spiritual sebagai seorang manusia. ( )

BTRIPP's review of Jacob Needleman's "What Is God?" (1113 words) ( )

Reading Jacob Needleman’s spiritual, yet philosophical memoir What Is God? is akin to watching a slow-paced movie where you know it’s worth watching because you have this inkling that something big, shocking, revelatory—a giant epiphany—will surface at the end like the lost city of Atlantis. But all along you are thinking, where is he going with this? And will he ever answer the question he posed? Three quarters of my way through the book I was still asking myself that question. Patience, I told myself. And that is the same thing I would tell the reader. The book builds up slowly, but in the end delivers the answer to its question.

My first impression upon seeing Needleman’s book in the religion section of my local bookstore was that it must be an ambitious work. Needleman, who I had never heard of, was certainly tackling a gargantuan question. When I opened the back flap, I discovered that he was a professor, and not just any professor, a professor of philosophy who had penned over fourteen books. Clearly, he was up to the task of posing and possibly answering such an age-old question. As a philosopher and former atheist-turned man of faith, Needleman’s perspective was bound to be compelling.

What Is God? is a challenging read. It requires attention, concentration, maybe even a pencil in your hand. It does not swiftly move by like, for instance, Deepak Chopra’s How to Know God. You really have to pay attention. It’s almost as if you are a student in one of Needleman’s classes, such is his pedagogical tone.

The book begins with the chapter “My Father’s God,” where Needleman writes of looking at the night sky with his father when, he says, “something deep inside me started breathing for the first time” and “the whole universe itself suddenly opened its arms to me.” Such is his earliest experience with God, though he eventually turns to atheism. A skeptic of organized religion and original sin (at one point he admits to burning The Confessions of St. Augustine), he believed that religion, in particular, the Judaism of his family, “had nothing to do with the sky full of stars, the still and silent mantis…it had nothing to do with what…I had learned to call God.” So it seems his atheism was not totally devoid of God.

What then follows is the course of his career as an undergraduate student of philosophy at Harvard and a graduate student at Yale. Needleman spends many pages sharing the writers and thinkers who marked a profound affect on his philosophical and spiritual life, namely D.T. Suzuki, P.D. Ouspensky, G.I. Gurdjieff and Jeanne de Salzmann.

Needleman charts how his faith had developed from reading the works of Immanuel Kant (he devotes an entire chapter to The Critique of Pure Reason), David Hume and others of the Age of Enlightenment, focusing on the power and importance of empirical thought. For Needleman, God can be known through an empirical process, what he calls “higher attention.” By simply focusing, giving one’s full attention, one can engage in higher attention, and thus, God. Higher attention inward may allow one to experience the Self with a capital S, the true self, that deeply quiet higher being, behind the self with a lowercase s, the egotistical me. In the end, this is his epiphany, that God can be experienced empirically, and does not have to be divorced from science or philosophy.

Though it is not an easy read, and may not work for the mainstream reader (I found the narrative disorganized at times and the chapter headings random and disconnected), What Is God? is ideal for a philosophical or spiritual reader. Needleman brought back my own memories toiling through philosophical texts in my undergraduate courses: Philosophy of Law, The Age of Enlightenment and Modernism. These were courses that changed my own thinking.

“…I learned from my own years of inner work that the great questions of life cannot be answered by the mind alone,” Needleman writes, “but only when they are asked with the whole of one’s being.” ( )