What is God?

In this book, Jacob Needleman intimately considers humanity's most vital question: What is God? He begins by taking us more than a half-century into the past, to his own experience as a brilliant, promising Ivy-educated student of philosophy - atheistic, existential, and unwilling to blindly participate in childish religiosity. But an unsettling meeting with the venerated Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki, combined with the sudden necessity to accept a position teaching philosophy and religion, forced the young academician to look more closely at the religious ideas he had once thought dead. Within traditional religious texts the scholar discovered a core of powerful spiritual and philosophical ideas, more mature and challenging than anything he had ever associated with Judaism, Christianity, or the religions of the East.

At the same time, Needleman came to realize - as he shares with the reader - that ideas and words are not enough. Ideas and words, no matter how profound, cannot prevent hatred, arrogance, and ultimate despair; nor can they keep our individual lives from descending into violence and illusion. With this insight, Needleman begins to open the reader to a new kind of understanding: The inner realization that to lead the lives we were intended for, the very nature of human experience must change, including the very structure of our perception and, indeed, the very structure of our minds.

ISBN 1585427403   Pages 224 ISBN13 9781585427406 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc   Weight (grammes) 367 Imprint Jeremy P Tarcher   Published in Los Angeles Format Hardback   Height (mm) 210 Publication date 25 Jan 2010   Width (mm) 140 DEWEY 211   Spine width (mm) 23 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level General

Ch. 1		My Father's God		3
Ch. 2		Who Am I?		16
Ch. 3		God and the Mind		28
Ch. 4		God and the Mind II		39
Ch. 5		Beyond the Hollow Mind: The Idea of God		65
Ch. 6		The Question Within the Question		85
Ch. 7		Return to the Miraculous		95
Ch. 8		What Is a Human Being?		102
Ch. 9		And What of God?		109
Ch. 10		The Critique of Pure Reason		116
Ch. 11		Echo from the Future		123
Ch. 12		The Cave of Absence		136
Ch. 13		The Atheist		141
Ch. 14		The Fundamentalist		149
Ch. 15		Tuesday		161
Ch. 16		God and the Emotions		167
Ch. 17		"God Sends the Wind, but Man Must Raise the Sail"		183
Ch. 18		Attention		193
Ch. 19		What Is God?		202
Ch. 20		Conclusion: What the Religions Call God		215
		Coda		227
		Notes		229
		Index		233
		About the Author		243

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