Jacob Needleman > Quotes

“This is the mark of great ideas: they unify people and they also act to unify the disparate parts of the human being; they speak of a social order that is possible on the basis of an ordering within the individual self.”
― Jacob Needleman, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders

“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

“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”
― Jacob Needleman, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders

“What an abundance of leisure the person gains who is not looking over at what his neighbor is saying, doing, or thinking, but only at what he himself is doing, in order that he does what is just and respectful of the gods. As Agathon4 said, do not peer into the darkness of another’s character, but run straight toward the finish line without straying from your path.”
― Jacob Needleman, The Essential Marcus Aurelius

“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 apart 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.”
― Jacob Needleman, The Essential Marcus Aurelius

“Acornology

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their life with a purposeful energy; and since they were mid-life baby-boomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called “Getting All You Can out of Your Shell” and “Who Would You Be Without Your Nutty Story?” There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being.

One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped out of the blue by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And to make things worse, crouched beneath the mighty oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing up at the tree, he said, “We … are … that!”

Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but they continued to engage him in conversation: “So tell us, how do we … become that tree?” “Well,” said he, pointing downward, “it has something to do with going into the ground … and cracking open the shell.”

“Insane!” they responded. “Totally morbid! Why then we wouldn’t be acorns anymore.”
― Jacob Needleman, Lost Christianity

“The conclusion is that the teachings of Christ as we know them are meant for people of a higher level than we ourselves. And the lost element in Christianity is the specific methods and ideas that can, first, show us the subhuman level at which we actually exist and, second, lead us toward the level at which the teachings of Christ can be followed in fact, rather than in imagination. In brief, there are levels of Christianity. Failure to understand what this means has led to the distortion of the Christian teaching, with all that that implies in the collective history of Western civilization.”
― Jacob Needleman, Lost Christiantiy

“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

“One of the great purposes of the American nation is to shelter and guard the rights of all men and women to seek the conditions and the companions necessary for the inner search.”
― Jacob Needleman

“It’s good to be open-minded, but not so open that your brains fall out.
-Jacob Needleman”
― Jacob Needleman

“In other cultures, perhaps less alienated from the teachings of wisdom, mankind lived in closer relationship to biological time, the pulses and rhythms of nature, the sun and the moon, the tides, the seasons, the light and darkness, all the measures and meters of the music of the earth and the skies. But even this time, this more natural time, is not in itself human time. Human time is always the time of the consciousness that says and means I, I am…

To live in accordance with nature’s time is to allow the nature that is within us to beat with more synchronous rhythms — the body’s tempo, the tempos of organic love and fear and tenderness and anger; and the tempos and rhythms of the mind that searches, that needs to guide and receive the action of the senses, to plan and manage and to remember the gods, the greater forces…

To live with these tempos and times more in harmony is to live in the time of earth and nature and to be a more ready receptacle for the consciousness that can truly say I am.”
― Jacob Needleman

“We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning.”
― Jacob Needleman