Making sleepwalkers of us all:

...But it is precisely this dead-ness, this willingness simply to be an institution, which people reject when they reject institutional religion...

...I knew a former Catholic who joined a theosophically inclined order (they talked a lot about "perfect masters" and "hidden traditions" which they believed they had tapped into), a Jew who joined a fundamentalist Christian church, a young journalist who had for awhile been associated seriously with a group which worshipped Christ and Satan both, and I had been asked by the new wife of a friend if I believed in the Third Eye...

...What is best and highest in religion can be used to insulate us from the very transformation which those traditons call for...

...But little is communicated of the depths of tradition, the actual ways in which one should set about learning to pray, learning the radical obedience to the will of God which is the heart of the Gospel...

...This is hardly news: one French cynic said that Jesus came to reveal the Kingdom of God, but all that came of it was the Catholic church...

...True consciousness "is born in the confrontation between great reality and our present false condition...

...He has plainly been influenced by the thought and work of Gurdjieff and his followers, a work which involves intensive self-examination...

...It seems to me, for instance, that in his writing the divine is seen too often as a force or hierarchy of forces to be climbed, as if the spiritual help we are given were directly proportionate to our current understanding, or were a result of effort...

...Needleman is good on what's wrong with those Christians, whether monastic or charismatic, who offer surefire methods of prayer and contemplation...

...But given Needleman's proper concerns that is probably inevitable, and he clearly does not believe that it all comes down to method...

...Meanwhile, of course, the disease worsens and they eventually die of it, smiling in grateful hope as on their deathbed someone reads to them yet another passage from the text...

...It can fool us into thinking that we have given ourselves over to God, that we are at least in the process of "losing ourselves in order to find ourselves," when it is in fact leading us into more subtle levels of ego-involvement...

...Lost Christianity (Bantam, $3.50) is concerned with the idea that Christianity is about human transformation, but currently does not seem to know what it is for, or do what it is meant to do...

...At the same time I wondered about the distance between what is preached, celebrated, and lived in most Christian congregations, and what I met in that man...

...People who are members of any religious tradition must understand that ego can and will convert absolutely anything to its own uses, a phenomenon which has social as well as personal resonances...

...Needleman, a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, saw the interest in new religions as reflections of a more profound religious crisis...

...On the evidence of these books it would appear that Needleman is an adherent of no one religious way...

...It might be because secularization had removed the pressure to be religious in order to be respectable...

...Great ideas - those we meet in Plato, for example - have the power to stop us in our tracks...

...Religious understanding runs the risk of being seduced by the secularism which it ought to challenge...

...It was free from the hysteria, shallow thinking, and exaggeration that accompanied most other treatments of the new religions...

...he is, for instance, among those critics of institutional religion who believe that the Constantinian acceptance of Christianity has created major problems where the transmission of Christianity is concerned...

...People are going to these new religions for emotions, for experiences, not for reality...

...All are worth reading...

...But it might also, he felt, be an important evolutionary change: perhaps for some reason it might be necessary now to be involved with ideas which have nothing to do with ideas your parents found necessary...

...Its structure allows Needleman to be by turns very personal, academic and detached, critical, and (in the character of Father Sylvan, who takes up a good deal of the book) allusive and somewhat allegorical...

...True philosophy is a matter of life and death...

...n who has no attention...

...His The New Religions was by far the best of the books written on the theme...

...This phenomenon is what lies behind the paradox that one and the same religious tradition can offer us, during the same period of time, a St...

...The sense of God as personal, as someone who from His side can break through our illusions, is not here...

...We have forgotten what religion is for...

...Some of the concerns here found their way into a book which is likely to be of interest to many Commonweal readers...

...But it is not only to prevent evil that we should seek the deepest roots of the wisdom of our tradition...

...Yet the wish for truth does change us, if only for an instant...

...But what Needleman has done, as no other recent writer has, is to locate some central and lasting religious problems, ones which have far deeper significance than our concerns with religious observance or social morality...

...In the middle-sized Midwestern town where I live I had encountered not only Moonie and Krishna missionaries - they're everywhere - but also knew of one marriage which had JOHN garvey is a columnist for Commonweal...

...We are meant to become the kind of being who can look upon the face of God and live...

...Only the most careful attention and good spiritual guidance can help us through some of this, and that is precisely what people do not find in most churches or synagogues...

...He quotes from his interview with Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, an Orthodox bishop and author of several excellent books about prayer: "The problem of these new religions is just that they do give results...

...Ideas alone, he says, "change nothing essential in a man...

...I don't agree with all of Jacob Needleman's emphases or assumptions...

...It keeps not only individuals but whole societies imprisoned and makes sleepwalkers of us all...

...Lost Christianity is a hard book to characterize easily...

...What is preached in most churches is a pallid morality which for the most part could cause controversy only among those who were trying actively to be indecent...

...Why Philosophy is Easy" (a wonderfully ironic title) introduces concerns which are fleshed out in The Heart of Philosophy...

...Needle-man believes that it is not enough for us to court mystical experience or to look for a profoundly moving emotional confirmation of our beliefs - this can in fact get in the way of transformation...

...One was a brilliant, not particularly religious scholar who was fascinated with the way in which young people from deeply traditional backgrounds found it increasingly easy to leave behind the religions of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents for new religions or, more commonly, no religion at all...

...What the Gospel speaks about is clearly the transformation of the whole human being...

...A great question can bring us to a halt and force us to question everything we have previously thought sure and settled...

...Consciousness and Tradition also contains valuable and exciting essays on medicine and healing as sacred functions, magic and religion, cultural and technological change, and the need for spiritual guidance...

...It is as though they were all to take great comfort in that book and in what they heard, going through their lives knowing that their disease could be cured, quoting passages to their friends, preaching the wonders of this great book, and returning to their congregation from time to time to hear more of the inspiring diagnosis and treatment read to them...

...In The Heart of Philosophy (Knopf, $14,95) Needleman deals at length with an idea which is recurrent in his writing...

...it gave hope...

...The problem is more subtle and more dangerous...

...And Kierkegaard said that the confession of Christianity had to begin with the confession that we are not Christians...

...Francis of Assisi, and murderous crusades...

...In preparing All Our Sons and Daughters I came across the work of Jacob Needleman...

...it might be necessary (in view of whatever it is that will happen next to the human race) to carry such allegiances lightly...

...it can shore up its defenses with the best material we give it, and make it impossible for the words of Jesus or the prophets to penetrate our hearts...

...we are told that we must die in order to live...

...The other man was an Orthodox monk who conveyed a sense of what it means to be a Christian which seemed to me then and still seems to me more on target, more true, than anything I have encountered in my life...

...that much has been said time and time again...

...Not even God," Needleman's Father Sylvan says, "can help a man who has no attention...

...The implications of our tradition are only hinted at in the churches...

...It is as though millions of people suffering from a painful disease were to gather together to hear someone read a text book of medical treatment in which the means necessary to cure their disease were carefully spelled out...

...We should do this because we are asked to lose everything in order to gain everything...

...Needleman's point, here and in other writings, is not only that there is an obvious difference between the human (and divine) possibilities suggested by the great religious traditions, and the actual lives of people who claim to believe in them...

...Ego can convert absolutely anything to its own uses, including morality, prayer, and meditation...

...An experience always seems real, even if what you experience is illusory in nature...

...The best reason for being Catholic, or Anglican, or Jewish was never simply the fact that your parents were...

...And this is, of course, true not only of the new religions...

...Jacob Needleman's books raise important questions and are sure to be disturbing to anyone who has landed in one of many camps which dot the religious landscape...

...He was someone in whose presence (and it was simply that, his presence, more than anything he said or did) my own life was thrown into relief and seen for the sloppy and unfocused thing it is...

...This is combined with reassurances that God loves us and that we ought to pray...

...For the first time I had a sense of what it could mean really to be a Christian...

...Perhaps for some a troubling thought crosses their minds as their eyes close for the last time: . . . "Haven't I forgotten actually to undergo treatment...

...Needleman suggests that the wish for truth is "the only really non-egoistic impulse accessible to most modern people...

...This was not an appealing notion, but it certainly was an interesting one, even though it does involve a questionable notion of what evolution does...

...Perhaps for this reason there is too much fascination with spiritual method...

...SOME CENTRAL & LUSTING RELIGIOUS PROBLEMS Making sleepwalkers of us all JOHN GARVEY SEVERAL YEARS AGO I edited a book about religious cults (All Our Sons and Daughters, Templegate, 1977) and in the process I did a lot of reading about the subject, which interested me for personal reasons...

...And people who are involved in efforts to make religion relevant to social or psychological problems will be bothered by Needleman's insistence that a concern for relevance misses the point completely...

...And this experience was not only not discouraging...

...Not long before all this I had spoken with two remarkable men...

...It is much more likely to take forms so new we will not notice them until it is too late...

...The distance was about the same as the distance between myself and the Gospel - seeing a problem is not necessarily the same thing as solving it...

...His books include Saints for Confused Times (Thomas More Press...

...But not necessarily in a religious sense...

...but there is almost no sense of this to be found in the ordinary religious congregation...

...There is almost nothing heard about the Christ who might unsettle and challenge us at levels that are much deeper than morality...

...We would be naive to think that this problem has disappeared with the advent of secularism...

...In Consciousness and Tradition (Crossroad, $14.95) Needleman offers a series of essays which in some cases blossomed into later books...

...been broken up by the husband's conversion to a narrow form of Hinduism...

...When it attempts to be relevant it may find itself accepting the very assumptions it ought to question...

...Conservative traditionalists will find him uncomfortable reading...