What Is God? by Jacob Needleman

What Is God? Reviews

• 
  robin friedman

  A Philosopher's Spiritual Autobiography
  
  People frequently are led to the books they need. I recently read a book by United States Congressman Tim Ryan "A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit" about the practice of mindfulness meditation. Ryan's book reminded me of a book about the nature, spiritual character, and potential of American democracy, with all its flaws, that I had read some time ago by the philosopher Jacob Needleman: "The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders". I wanted to read Needleman again and found this book, "What is God?" (2009). The book gave me a broader understanding of Needleman, a Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and a prolific writer. More importantly, the book helped me to better understand philosophy and the religious search.
  
  Needleman's book is largely a memoir about his development as a philosopher and about the formulation of his own religious convictions. In the process of telling his own story, Needleman has a great deal to say about questions philosophers in common with other people ask about religion. The book does not purport to be a philosophical study of religion as such, but rather is intimate in tone and personal.
  
  I became absorbed in the book because I could identify with much of Needleman's life. Like Needleman, I was a non-practicing Jew fascinated with religious questions and doubts who majored in philosophy in college. Although Needleman wants his readers to focus on the heart, this work is steeped in books and in philosophy. Here as well, I remember sharing the author's passion for Kant, Hume, Plato, Nietzsche, Eckhart, Jewish mysticism, Buddhism, and William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience". Conversely, a good deal of the people and books that influenced Needleman, particularly the teachings of Gurdjieff and his circle, is unknown to me. And Needleman makes no mention of a thinker important to me and to contemporary thought, religious and secular: the excommunicated Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. Spinoza and Enlightenment influence my own religious thinking in a way that seems to be less important for Needleman. Kant appears to play a somewhat similar role for him.
  
  The book focuses on Needleman's lifelong quest for understanding "what is God?" The story is told chronologically in part but skips and moves around to show steps in how the philosopher came to his religious position. A large part of the story is that what comes out at the end or in the process of growth is implicit in the beginning. Needleman states at the outset: "To think about God is to the human soul what breathing is to the human body." Needleman discusses his early years with early experiences of the vastness of the sky and the death of a loved one seemingly contrasted with the religious formalism of his parents. Needleman seems to have been drawn into philosophy as a career by his reading of Kant as a Harvard sophomore. A meeting as a young graduate student with Zen master D.T. Suzuki troubled Needleman in its studied ambiguity but led him to put a purely empirical, scientific philosophy behind him. As a young academic, Needleman received the opportunity to teach a course in Western religious thought which led the way to his personal and professional approaches to religion. He did not return to Judaism but learned immeasurably from Jewish writers and Jewish mystics. Needleman also learned a great deal about Christianity and Christian theology.
  
  The book has a tone of speaking closely to the reader. The book's language is rich, with long, descriptive, passionate sentences that one does not always associate with philosophy. The subject is indeed, as Needleman says, the "discipline of the heart". I learned from the passages of self-revelation as well as from Needleman's philosophical discussions of many of the books he has read. Although Gurdjieff receives the largest amount of attention, the book that interested me most was "The Crisis of the Modern World" by Rene Guenon. According to Needleman, Guenon offers a "merciless critique of modernity", a "critique based on Guenon's vision of an ancient primordial tradition from which all civilizations and great religions, including Christianity, had arisen." I need to read Guenon's book.
  
  I also was moved by Needleman's portrayal of his philosophy classrooms and his interactions with two students, the first an elderly woman who professed herself an atheist and the second a young man who professed Christian fundamentalism. Needleman seemed particularly drawn to this latter intelligent, dogmatic individual, with his similarities and differences from Needleman himself.
  Among other things, Needleman made me think again of my own possible alternative life and career path if I had pursued my work in philosophy.
  
  The book moves towards Needleman's growing interest in Gurdjieff. His teachings encouraged Needleman to experience God and self in an apparently paradoxical manner. The final part of Needleman's book is devoted to a brief exposition of Gurdjieff's thought together with its practice of Attention. From my initial reading, Gurdjieff's practice of Attention appeared similar to Buddhist mindfulness. Needleman sees a substantial difference, and I am not in a position to disagree. The point of the book, however, is not to make the reader a follower of Gurdjieff. Rather, the presentation is open-ended and is intended to bring the reader to focus on what is valuable and important in the religious search. Needleman engages in what he describes as a method of "indirect communication" he attributes to Kierkegaard. This is a form of writing which was "intentionally designed to point me toward finding the answer not only for myself, but in myself and not on the printed page or in the abstract words of an author."
  
  I learned a great deal from revisiting the philosophical life and the search for religion with Jacob Needleman.
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  Maughn Gregory

  Needleman is one of the few people writing on religion who gets it right: most of the religious traditions of the world have precious insights about what really matters in life, what human beings are capable of, and practices to help us do the kind of self-work that brings spiritual growth. But those insights are often obscured by dogmatic creeds and hubristic mythology, and those practices are often misconstrued as magical rituals for removing suffering and fulfilling unexamined desire.
  
  This book is largely autobiographical: an account of how Needleman moved from staunch atheism to a kind of spirituality that isn't quite a theism.
  
  One sure way of telling if a religious or spiritual person has integrity is to get their reaction to the "new atheists." Here too, Needlemen is exactly right: Believers and non-believers alike owe the new atheists a debt of gratitude for their function of "the purgation of illusion and fantasy from our concept of God; the exposure of the superficiality of our so-called beliefs; the masks our minds put over our inability to be what we are meant to be.... That bittersweet absence of illusion and self-deception, that empty space swept clean by astringent skepticism and purgatorial self-honesty: here perhaps is a truly sacred space in our otherwise self-deceived, chaotic world." (223)
  
  
• 
  TheQueensBooksII

  I was enthralled by Needleman’s research, deeply insightful religious, psychological and spiritual probing spanning decades and by his raw, personal revelations to his readers. That said, many passages required multiple reading, and many bright and poignant points were made unnecessarily convoluted by strained prose.
  Needleman traces his beginnings as a young Jew, learning and struggling with the religion of his fathers, diving deeply into and teaching many other religious and spiritual approaches, and ultimately being mostly influenced by Gurdjieff, of whom I had never before heard. Ultimately, Needleman draws some captivating conclusions about how inextricably and deftly the human being is linked to God, and the awe-filled role we play in how God manifests Himself in the world. This, to me, is the true “humanism,”—not the “We are God; No! We are bigger than God!” humanism that is so destructive today; but the deeply spiritually linked humanism that answers the riddle: “Q: Where would God hide Himself if He wanted no one to find him? A: Inside each of us.” I already knew as I read the book that at least one more reading will doubtless be required for me to fully comprehend and remember Needleman’s more important ideas, so I very humbly submit my immature review of the book; but, for me it was fascinating and highly recommended.
• 
  Juraj Bilený

  „Volalo mne Poznání, a Poznání bylo Životem, a Život byl mým Bohem. Půjdu tam, kde je Život“.
  
  Cesta filozofa k objaveniu Boha. Rozprávanie bolo miestami chaotické, čo sa mi ale k tejto téme náramne hodilo, aj slzy boli.
• 
  Yelda Basar Moers

  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.”
  
• 
  Sonic

  Jacob Needleman speaks with a sensitivity and an intelligence that is extremely rare these days. And he speaks from experience, and not just from his thoughts, or his mind. I have read and loved many (but not all) of Mr. Needleman's books and this one might be his best work and also his most important book.
  
  I highly recommend this book for everyone.
  
  Mr. Needleman writes with a down-to-earth sincerity that is also unimaginably rare these days, and it informs this book with a depth that is almost unnoticed in his plain, honest and direct voice.
  
  And while he does not try to convince anyone of anything (that is clearly not his main objective,) I feel his is a much needed voice in our times,
  when Atheism is such a popular "intellectual" trend.
  
  These things need to be questioned, that is all I am saying.
  
  A child may have very primitive and fantastical notions of what the president of the United States is, but just because the child may have very stupid ideas about the POTUS does not meant that the POTUS does not exist. This is my analogy which I paraphrase thus:
  
  Just because we may have stupid ideas about something, does not mean that that something does not exist. Maybe instead of dismissing the "thing," what needs to be got rid of, is one's own stupid ideas.
  
  This book encourages us to seek and to question.
  And isn't that what the best books do?
  
  
  
• 
  Pranada Comtois

  I love Needleman. He's down to earth and unpretentious, though a great philosopher and teacher and he has a deep heart based on the interviews and books I've read. Much of this book has autobiographical anecdotes. Needelman's personal journey from atheist/skeptic to accepting the unknown with new perceptions and trust based on experience speaks to our genuine experience in the 20-21 century as we move toward deeper understandings of the unseen power around us.
  
  He doesn't speak from one tradition, though he appears deeply transformed by Gurdjieff. I'd love to open a dialogue with him. I tire of New Age and New Thought sugar water like we get from Chopra, Osteen, Dyer and others. I want solid thinking and Needleman delivers.
  
  
  
• 
  John Kaufmann

  A complex and slow read, but rewarding if you take the time to read it slowly and let the ideas percolate. The book is a little difficult not only because of the complexity of thought, but also because his writing style is a little obscure. However, it was made much more readable by virtue of being very personal -- it is about his personal search and his experiences, so there is a storytelling flavor to the narrative rather than just being a philosophical tome. While his "answer" is not all that unique or surprising, the main source of his key idea was very unlikely (especially considering his background as an academic philosopher) -- such that had I known beforehand, I might have skipped the book.
• 
  David Guy

  I read this book on the advice of a friend. Jacob Needleman has taken on a rather large question here, and really he has written a spiritual autobiography, which includes reference to the Gurdjieff work, but I actually think he's written a superb book, and given a wonderful answer to the question. This was one of those rare books where I would read a chapter, then sit down and read it again. It was a very rich reading experience. I felt that his last chapter tried to sum things up a little too much, which must be a temptation for a book with this title. But I really loved this book.
• 
  Michelle Leduc Catlin

  I was going to give this complex and thought-provoking book 4 stars, based on my enjoyment. But this book is about so much more than "a good read." It is the most intimate and comprehensive journey of discovery I have ever encountered. It pushed me, frustrated me, challenged me, and ultimately enlightened me. I don't pretend to understand all of it, but I do know that it has earned its 5 stars by expanding my thinking. I'm pretty sure this is not the last time I'll read it.
• 
  John Martindale

  I really loved parts of this book, it was thought provoking and I really liked the personal aspect and his recounting experiences with certain beloved religious writers and philosophers, and his learning to appreciate ancient books that he wants despised. I loved his stories of being in a classroom teaching.
  With that said, it is a struggle coming away from this book and being able to state "What is God" according to Needleman. He wrote beautifully about attention, genuinely awareness, those people who have a transcendent quality about them, and such streams of thought seemed to come together somehow for him, on what is God. I got the sense he is more inclined towards understanding God more like a force/energy, though he is a reflective philosopher and it doesn't come across as a new age mess of pottage.
  
  I've been reading "Honest to God" by Robinson, who though Robinson was a Christian, he seemed to move some way from the view of a theistic view of God. Yet at the same time seeing God as love. He quoted Bonhoeffer, and I have been thinking about this quote in connection with Needleman's book.
  
  "God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us....
  ...What do we mean by 'God'? Not in the first place an abstract belief in his omnipotence, etc. That is not a genuine experience of God, but a partial extension of the world. Encounter with Jesus Christ, implying a complete orientation of human being in the experience of Jesus as one whose only concern is for others. This concern of Jesus for others the experience of transcendence. This freedom from self, maintained to the point of death, the sole ground of his omnipotence, omniscience and ubiquity. Faith is participation in this Being of Jesus. Our relation to God, not a religious relationship to a supreme Being, absolute in power and goodness, but a new life for others, through participation in the Being of God. The transcendence consist not in tasks beyond our scope and power, but in the nearest Thou at hand. God in human form, not, as in other religions, in animal form--monstrous, chaotic, remote and terrifying--nor yet in abstract form--the absolute, metaphysical, infinite, etc.--nor yet in the Greek divine-human of autonomous man, but man existing for others, and hence the Crucified. A Life based on the transcendent."
  
  It is interesting thinking of God with the music metaphor. Even if we've never heard any music, there is something innate that would be able recognize and appreciate rhythm, harmony and order. In a weird away even without a song, its like the song exist, but human beings must sound it forth, enter into it, express it. When we hear music, we have a sense of wrongness with that which is not harmonious, and a sense of rightness with a beautiful melody. Sometimes we'd be able to experience those transcendent moments with music, and other times not so much, but still enjoy music even when it doesn't completely raise us to another realm. But yeah, though we have this innate ability, if we or others don't make music, its not like its going to sound forth. In a weird sense, for Needleman and others, I kind of wonder God is like a song, not a song that will sing aloud and embrace us, but more like the force/energy/principle/order that we can somehow part take in if we DO, we can in essence abide in, sometimes experience the transcendent, when we ourselves or when we are with others who are singing in harmony with the Song. When we truly are aware, when we genuinely love others, and give them our full attention, when we are raised above the animal self, when we experience that deeper conscience that isn't simply socially conditioned, then we perhaps are abiding in God.
• 
  Phil

  A very written spiritual autobiography, but as an autobiography, the reader, necessarily younger than Needleman, might not understand the contexts in which he is speaking as the backdrop to his thought.
  
  He comes from an assimilated, acculturated, secular Jewish background. All he knows about Judaism, he admits, comes from vestigial memories (largely negative) of his immigrant grandparents and their children.
  
  When, as a junior instructor, he "discovers" Judaism, he does it thought liberal, secular sources: Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem (who in actual life disliked one another intensely!)
  
  Buber's Tales of the Hasidim were already known to be romanticized retelling Of tales ripped out of context.
  
  Scholem's knowledge of mysticism was based on his reading of sources and historical contextualizion. (Aside: my favorite Scholem anecdote - When Scholem as a young man arrived ay Jerusalem, someone asked if he would like to meet the venerable Kabbalists who inhabited the Old City. Scholem declined, saying he could read Hebrew as well as they could! In other words, the accumulated practical and non-verbal knowledge was of no interest!)
  
  Needleman mentions Maimonides is passing, but did he read and absorb the Guide? Did he look at Halevi's Kuzari?
  
  The Zohat fascinated Needleman in the early 1960s, a time when only partial and often inaccurate translations were available.
  
  As Judaism was perceived through liberal German (pre-WWII spectacles), so too was Christianity: Bultmann and Barth.
  
  Did he read Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure for another (more orthodox) view?
  
  Gnosticism also fascinated him. But the only source available at the time was Han Jonas' then magisterial opus, and the "problem" with his work is that there were at the time no Gnostic texts available, translated or studied. Everything was extracted from ante-Nicene Church Fathers, who saw Gnosticism negatively.
  
  Reading other reviews on Goodreads, I am struck by how many praise the book highly, having read it more than once.
  
  Are they aware of how constrained and limited his perceptions were 60 years ago?
  
  Still and all, the book is a valuable resource, for it does ask the right questions. As for "what is God?" There are as many answers as there are stars in the heavens Needleman looked as a small child at the start of the book.
• 
  Beth Haynes

  This book fascinates me - and I still don't think I fully grasp what he is saying. Not because he isn't clear, but because his ideas are so different from ones I've encountered before.
  The book proceeds in a mostly chronological order of the progression of Needleman's own thinking on matters of spirituality, religion, and philosophy.
  As a philosophy professor and product of Western scientific, materialistic thinking, for most of his life he stands relatively firmly in his atheistic beliefs. His perspective changes as he teaches philosophy and history of Western religious thought. Kudos for his inquisitive, open mind!
  He provides an intriguing alternative definition of faith and explores the limitations of relying solely on intellect for complete understanding. His concept of God is still not clear to me, but it is quite different than the vengeful, demanding, omnipotent God of the Bible. It seems to be a blend of the various unitary consciousness beliefs in ancient wisdom traditions and the mystical sects of Judaism Christianity and Islam. But that's where i'm still not clear and a second reading may help me understand better.
  If you are interested in exploring the questions of who are we, what is consciousness and what (if anything) is God - I recommend giving this book a read.
  
• 
  L.B. Holding

  Needleman is a Jewish philosopher, which is why I was especially interested in his point of view on this one. He presents all the great philosophers and their stances on God, so we get to review Kant, Hume, and Socrates, while also tuning in to Zen considerations. Fascinating stuff, and yes, I'd recommend this one if you're into philosophy.
  
  Here's a good paragraph, toward the end of the book, regarding atheism:
  
  "Might we allow 'atheism' to challenge our passive, hypocritical, or superstitious beliefs in order to make room for ideas and thinking that can nourish the human soul in the way that breathing nourishes the human body? Might we allow honest atheism without seeding into our culture and into the minds of our children toxic concepts of what we are and what reality is? By toxic ideas, I mean ideas that deny the higher nature within ourselves that is still calling to us; concepts that smother the sense of wonder, the sense of the Higher in nature and in ourselves waiting to enter our lives. Such toxic concepts are now everywhere, presuming to be realistic only because they fight against an equally toxic religious arrogance."
  
  
• 
  J.

  Too roundabout. I ultimately gave up about 75% of the way through when I realized I didn't actually have any idea what his answer to the titular question was. I appreciate the personal nature of the work, but I was unable to get his point.
• 
  Matt

  5/5
  
  Like a long, private conversation with a close friend. Not plot driven, but thrilling nonetheless. Many things I felt and thought but could not verbalize in my own spiritual life, which I believe has been reaffirmed and repaired through his work.
• 
  Kieran Cooper

  Some lovely sentimental recollections and reflections, mixed in with nods to various historical theological and ‘spiritual’ heavyweights, but mostly well meaning but pointless drivel.
• 
  Jamey

  It had its moments, but the Gurdjieff stuff made no sense to me and I walked away pretty much empty-handed.
• 
  Lexie

  One man's philosophic search for God. "What is the inner experience of this search?" is the primary question ... Jacob Needleman applies a lifetime of wisdom into the search, beginning with himself, as a boy, under a starry night ... I cherish this book in part because Needleman admits to once having been "allergic" to the word "God" ... just as I was ... and I realize, from reading *What is God?*, that my "allergy" has been to religion. ~ Masters and teachers who have influenced the author include Jesus, the Desert Fathers, the Gnostics, D.T. Suzuki, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, Buber, William James, the mystics of Jewish and Christian faith, and G.I Gurdjieff. ~ This book is beautiful -- intricately crafted, rigorously and lovingly thought out.
  
  Quotes:
  
  What is God? What am I? It was the same question, it was one question, one experience.
  
  ... to begin to understand what God is, demands from the very outset the presence in ourselves of what God is. ... we will discover that the presence of a higher vibration within ourselves is already there ...
  
  When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing toward destruction.
  
  The "eternal" ... comes toward man through a paradoxical fusion of pure gift from Above and radical inner choice from within ... a paradoxical inner reconciliation of two opposing realities: the eternal and the temporal, the infinite and the finite.
  
  That religion at its root is also a great work of the mind was nowhere even imagined. (Needleman thought this in 1962.)
  
  The real mind, the real instrument of understanding, is a blending of at least two fundamental sources of perception -- the intellect and the heart; the intellect and genuine feeling. And I was discovering that genuine feeling is not the same thing as emotional reaction.
  
  [This] is the meaning of the Christian idea of faith -- an act of pure receiving of the gift.
  
  ... the idea of God, the word itself, has taken on as many connotations and denotations as there are types of gradations of the human psyche.
  
  ... both world events and a man's own individual life either more toward a genine aim or, on the contrary, go nowhere at all, repeating, repeating, endlessly, meaninglessly ...
  
  By what intelligence did it all appear, an intelligence that embraces even the automatisms of Darwinian evolution on the ground of which everything from a mosquito to a Buddha appears on this earth?
  
  Real Truth can never bring despair because the real experience of Truth transforms the knower into everything he had yearned for in vain ...
  
  ... to think about God is to the human soul what breathing is to the human body.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Maria

  This is by far the most readable of Needleman's book that I have read. I found it very interesting to follow his journey from agnostic to atheist to believer. I'm not sure he ever explicitly said what he believes God is, but he certainly left me with much to think about.
  
  He talks a lot about being influenced by Gurdjieff's teachings. I didn't know much about them and may be interested in reading more.
  
  Some things I'd like to ponder further:
  
  p196: "It is only in and through people, inwardly developed men and women, that God can exist and act in the world of man on earth. Bluntly speaking, the proof for the existence of God is the existence of people who are inhabited by and who manifest God. Furthermore,... this evidence is perceived by means of what their presence evokes in oneself."
  
  p204-206: Needleman discusses "attention" and the idea that "the quality of man's attention is the key to the meaning of our lives and the possible growth of our being."
  
  I'd recommend this book to anyone who is interested in considering such ideas and isn't absolutely convinced that they already have all the answers.
• 
  Aziz

  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.
• 
  George

  A must read for anyone wanting to get way beyond the usual answers to the title's bold question. Jacob Needleman is at his best as he recounts his journey into the question "what is God". His answer, which can only be called his living response, gradually unfolds as he discovers over many decades who "He" really is. The reader will also see how his difficult, inner (spiritual) work directly relates to his answer. This book has a quality of honesty and seriousness that helps us understand the relationship between his questioning and his answer, and may very well challenge a reader to begin his/her own approach to the question.
• 
  Ian

  a nice summation of needleman's vast experience and exploration of this fundamental and unanswerable question. after finishing it, i was left thirsting and found this passage by Hafiz:
  
  "I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question: What is God? If you think that the Truth can be known from words, If you think that the sun and the ocean can pass through that tiny opening called the mouth, O someone should start laughing! Someone should start wildly laughing -- Now!"
  
  quite right.