Questions of the Heart, as Reflected in The American Soul

The American Soul

As Reflected in the Questions of the Heart

Why Do We Live?

Reason, Liberty and Love

“To repeat, this capacity which they called “reason” has little to do with what we usually refer to by that name. It is not something that can be programmed into a computer; nor is it a collection of information and data; nor is it the power to develop ingenious hypotheses for the purpose of short-term prediction and material advantage—all these are capacities of the mind which in their way are shared by the animals and many of which can even be performed better by machines. By “reason,” the Founding Fathers are speaking of a power within man that is capable actively of apprehending the essential truth and form of universal reality and morality. It is a capacity that acts independently of individual subjective emotion or instinctual attraction. By being thus independent of emotional or subjective preference, this “reason” is able to be the conduit not only of knowledge but of love, love that is not shackled to the personal and preferential.”

What Can We Hope For?

The Peacemakers

“Washingtonian democracy is not the freedom to try to destroy each other physically or philosophically or morally, but the freedom to bring one’s own best thought together with one’s best effort to listen and attend to the other. The aim is not to reach the pale and crooked version of mutual accommodation that we call “compromise,” which is often either ineffectual or ethically corrupt, but to discover a more comprehensive intelligence that allows each part and each partial truth to take its proper and necessary place in the life of the whole.”

Questions of the Heart, as Reflected in The American Soul

The American Soul

As Reflected in the Questions of the Heart

Why Do We Live?

Will

“....the world is what it is because man is what he is, that we cannot help the world unless we also help ourselves—not in the sense of self-gratification, but of helping ourselves discover to what greatness we really belong.”

Why is there Evil?

The State and the Self

“What Washington, and others after him, including Lincoln, feared was not the party system as such, but “the spirit of party.” By this term he meant the attitude that one’s own faction or part was more important than the whole; or, what came to the same thing, that one’s own party’s interests were the same as the interests of the whole. The “spirit of party” meant the commitment to fight for one’s own interests and to overcome, or even destroy, rather than learn from the opposition.”

The Spirit of Party and the Enemy Within

“Fallen self—inner slavery is the condition of being devoured by one’s own emotions, attractions and repulsions.”

How Should we Live?

“With the nation, as with the self, it is a matter of how one is engaged with the world, not so much with the objects of these engagements. It is a matter of attitude, discernment and, above all, freedom from unbalanced emotion.”

“To be independent—in a human sense—is to have one’s own mind and conscience, to be capable of consulting one’s own understanding and one’s own unique feeling without imitation of others and without anxiety about what one imagines will be their opinions and reactions. Speaking in religious language, an individual is said to be independent when he is answerable only to God. Speaking the language of Deism and the Enlightenment, an individual is independent when he is answerable only to—in Franklin’s words—the “Father of Lights”….

Questions of the Heart, as Reflected in I Am Not I

I Am Not I

As Reflected in the Questions of the Heart

Who am I?

I must explain this to you. It is about humanity, what a human being is, what human life means. The world has forgotten. You must not be swallowed by what the world tells you that you are, what the world will tell you.  

Why do we live?

Humanity was created, step by step, through the divine process of evolution, by very high forces in the universe. We human beings have uniquely evolved within the heart of Nature in order to bring these higher forces into the body, heart and mind of Earth, to irrigate Earth with the conscious energies that she now needs in order to advance her own development. 

Why do we suffer?

JERRY:  Will I remember what you tell me about the world?

JACOB:  Yes and no. You will remember the sound.  

When, in your future, you are born—and I deeply hope you will be born—when you are born, and when you have crossed the threshold into adulthood, you will begin to hear ideas about what is called mysticism; you will begin to read or hear about the mystics and their experiences of what they call God or the universe. Or about their struggle to conquer what they call their “self.” I want to tell you that almost nowhere in all those writings and accounts about their experiences can you find the whole truth. Even in the greatest of these books and stories, it is almost impossible to find the whole truth, or even the beginning of the whole truth.  

Questions of the Heart, as Reflected in the Recently Republished Book, Sorcerers

Sorcerers

An enthralling blend of sorcery, religion and philosophy, from which Jacob Needleman creates a brilliant moral fable for our times.

Sorcerers is the story of a teenage boy growing up in 1950s Philadelphia who is swept into a world of mysterious powers and extraordinary human possibilities.  On the threshold of maturity and yearning for something he cannot name, adolescent Eliot Appleman is welcomed into the Sorcerer's Apprentices, a club of young stage magicians, and is soon drawn into a perilous clash between two conflicting forces—the compulsion to manipulate others and the need to discover the deeper truths about his own nature.

As Reflected in the Questions of the Heart

What ought we to do?  

Am I alone in the universe?

“The womb of magic conceives but once and then withers away,” it said. “You must seek the seed and bend all your efforts to nourish it when it appears. Amid the artifices of the stage magician, amid the trappings and techniques, there will appear the reality beyond all artifice. Be quick to recognize it. It is in you. It is beyond you. Cultivate your professional style, your persona, and then, and only then, you may find your true self.”

Why do we suffer?

What can we hope for?

It now dawned on Eliot that Max favored anything that could bring him a sense of remorse about himself—not guilt, not regret, not passionate vows to do better next time, all of which Max dismissed in no uncertain terms.  Only remorse about what he was, with no possibility of doing anything about it, but only feeling it more and more.

Questions of the Heart, as Reflected in the Recently Republished Book, Sorcerers

Sorcerers

An enthralling blend of sorcery, religion and philosophy, from which Jacob Needleman creates a brilliant moral fable for our times.

Sorcerers is the story of a teenage boy growing up in 1950s Philadelphia who is swept into a world of mysterious powers and extraordinary human possibilities.  On the threshold of maturity and yearning for something he cannot name, adolescent Eliot Appleman is welcomed into the Sorcerer's Apprentices, a club of young stage magicians, and is soon drawn into a perilous clash between two conflicting forces—the compulsion to manipulate others and the need to discover the deeper truths about his own nature.

As Reflected in the Questions of the Heart

What can we know?

How should we live?

“Ask yourself: what’s the ideal trick? The boy climbs a rope, vanishes, his limbs fall to the ground, the magician throws them in a casket, and then out jumps the boy alive and kicking. The magician manipulates death, gravity, the structure of the human body. Eliot, every trick you do—if your act is serious—must have you controlling laws that others must submit to. That’s why you have to work with simple, fundamental objects. Elaborate apparatus is only good when fantastic things happen with it, things that are so impossible they could never happen no matter what apparatus one has. The apparatus then serves a definite purpose: it makes the audience believe you have access to powerful objects. That’s why good apparatus has to either look weird and outlandish, from another world, or it has to be simple and familiar. So, there are two kinds of magic: one where you have the power directly, like the fakir, or the other where you possess objects that have the power. Irene’s favorite was the linking rings: simple, perfect circles of steel. The audience examines them . . . let me show you.”

Who am I?

"More thoughts and questions came to him—about his own life, what he should do, what career to follow. But these things did not seem so important now, certainly not enough to waste his one wish on them. But then what was the most important thing in his life, really? He had seen that by using the power, under Blake, he had been able to get whatever he wanted—money, sex, honors—and that it still wasn’t enough. Guided by Max, he had touched something entirely different, something he never could have imagined wanting, and it was enough, more than enough. Yet it always cost him so much. It was always bought with a price. And he knew that he had barely scratched the surface of what Max had to offer him. Irene then spoke again. “Turn on your power, Eliot.”