WHAT IS GOD?

In French there is a word 'distrait', which translates as absent-minded and is a cognate of the English word distracted. It is a commonplace to state that we are living in an age of distraction - distracted from distraction by distraction. This means an absence of mind or attention, of being present in life and with each other. Gurdjieff, who reckoned that most human beings lived in a form of waking sleep, recommended an important practice of self-remembering - of being aware that one is aware. Normally, almost as soon as one does this, one loses this awareness until next time one remembers oneself.

At one level, this lucid book is a dialogue between Needleman as the Professor and as the Seeker - he moves from a purely intellectual approach to one that goes beyond the mind and includes the heart. I remember a Hungarian Mystic at a meeting in Prague saying that the spiritual journey was all about the route between the head and heart. Although the title might suggest a purely philosophical exploration, the book is much more than this, probing a deeper or higher level of understanding beyond the outward facing mind. It advocates an inner empiricism to match the outer empiricism of science - also discussed in my other review of Needleman's book on the environment.

Early in the book, he relates a key episode where he was fortunate enough, at the age of 22, to have an interview with DT Suzuki. He arrived armed with philosophical knowledge from Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard and others. Early in the encounter, he asks his key question: what is the self? Suzuki pauses and answers, as one might expect a Zen master to do: 'who is asking the question?' It is a critical moment, and Needleman no longer knows what to say. There is something, however, about the very presence of Suzuki that raises a question. What is it that informs what we call presence? He refers to a number of individuals who possessed this quality, notably Lord Pentland and Jeanne de Saltzman, both of whom were part of the Gurdjieff work.

In another telling episode, he is with a Tibetan lama, Lobsang Llalungpa, who asks him how many human beings he can see in the crowd around. Many human doings, but how many human beings? Then what does it mean to become a real human being? This is where inner attention and self-creation come in. In answering the question of the book's title, Needleman suggests that the only real proof of the existence of God is the existence of inwardly developed human beings. John Pentland and Jeanne de Saltzman were two such people: '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.' These people are those who are inhabited by and who manifest God, and the evidence or proof is perceived 'by means of what their presence evokes in oneself.' This presence is a certain quality of being or emanation that has been developed through spiritual practice and that incarnates a higher form of energy and attention. It is also a transformational way of knowing or gnosis that early Christians knew to be consistent with pistis, but which lay beyond it. In meeting Pentland, it simultaneously deflated his mind and gave him a glimpse of higher understanding that also radiated a quality of love. For most of us, there is a gap between how we imagine ourselves to be and what we can be by doing this inner work. I was reminded in this respect of the journey and writings of Simone Weil, who also placed great emphasis on attention.

In Jeanne de Salzmann, Needleman experiences a sense of silence as sacred energy, emphasising the importance of the quality of one's attention and awareness. He even goes so far as to say that I am my attention, that this attention gives a new and more meaningful sense of life. This means that the question about what God is entails a parallel question about the nature of the human. In this model, the energy that comes from above has to incarnate in the body - perhaps this is the true meaning of incarnation in a personal sense. For the Bulgarian sage Beinsa Douno, this meant the embodiment of the principles of love, wisdom and truth - indeed his tomb bears no name, only these three principles along with justice and virtue. We need both to receive and manifest this higher energy in order to awaken and make the journey between self and Self: 'few human beings exist who in themselves incarnate the action within their own human frame of the great conscious forces and laws of creation and conscious evolution.' This kind of presence is a force of consciousness and compassion. We need to move from being distracted and dissipated, without attention, to a state of more consistent and centred attention. What Needleman calls heartless brilliance is clearly insufficient to address the challenges brought about by cleverness without wisdom.

No one can do this work for another, because it depends on the understanding derived from personal experience and, as Gurdjieff suggests, only understanding can lead to being, and being is expressed in presence. This process involves both a descent and an ascent, as represented in the Star of David where the human being is interpenetrated with the divine presence. In Christianity, this is also about a receptivity to grace, but in either event the journey makes inner demands on us. We are constantly creating and recreating ourselves through our thoughts, feelings and actions. This higher, finer and more subtle energy can act through each of us but we ourselves must open up to allow this process to occur, which means regular periods of silent receptivity and tuning to inform the quality of our outer action in the world. Although this brilliantly written book is one man's reflective journey, there are many insights that we can all apply to our own lives.