Jacob Needleman is professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and the author of many books, including A Little Book on Love, Lost Christianity, and Money and the Meaning of Life. In addition to his teaching and writing, he serves as a consultant in the fields of psychology, education, medical ethics, philanthropy, and business, and is also known and appreciated in San Francisco for his informal discussions on the writings of Gurdjieff.

Kristen: Your book takes a unique look at love, by examining love not from its psychological underpinnings, but in light of the philosophy and wisdom teachings of the ages that instruct us on how to love.

Jacob: I have been trying in my writing over the years to find a bridge between the essence of the great spiritual traditions and our present lives as they are actually experienced--and with all the difficulties we have living here and now, in this culture. And the question of the love relationship is one of the aching questions of our time. It came for me from personal experience, like most of us have. But also just looking at people there seems to be no way of understanding what it means to love and stay in love--to stay with love. We all understand about falling in love. We all understand the passion. But [there is this] whole idea of what it means to maintain a relationship. Everybody I know is suffering in one way or another from that. So my question was: "Can the great teachings of the world throw light on that?" And when I looked at them, all the great ideas about divine love and spiritual love, they didn't really throw that kind of light on that. There was still something unrealistic in them. I'm a human being. I'm not a saint. We have bodies, we have needs. At the same time, we don't want to just have a life that is passively enslaved by our passing desires and physical needs and ego. So it seemed to me that there must be something in between, some intermediate bridge. And to me it became very clear, and it's not anything you will find explicitly in the great traditions nor in any of the psychological or philosophical literature that I knew of, that many of the best people in our culture are searching for an inner life, a transcendent dimension in themselves. They are seekers. And what human love can be with two people together is to somehow support each other's search. To me that became like a revelation. That was where the bridge was. It wasn't saintly love. It wasn't just merely physical or egoistic love, but to love another person, to support their search for meaning in some way. And that was what I suddenly realized I wanted to say and what I wanted to explore and it hadn't be said before, I don't think, in this way.

And the preponderance of all the relationship books these days seems to suggest that people are feeling a lot of despair in the realm of love. Why do you think people are feeling this now?

There's always despair in human life. It's mankind's situation. Humanity's always been a mess. There's something particularly agonizing about the fact that people try to find in a relationship with a man or a woman, something that used to be found in God, or in society, or in values, or in a job. People put a lot of hope in relationships for their personal happiness and it's not happening for most of them. It disappears. People really have not, more in this culture than in other cultures (and I'm not saying it was explicit in other cultures), digested the idea that love is work. Love is not just automatic. Now that's something that your grandmother would probably tell you. But what kind of work? After the passion of love fades away, there has to be intention. What is the role of intention in love? Most relationships break off at the moment when intention needs to come into it.

People think they do not have to work. They think they are entitled to automatic happiness. I'm not saying that people were not miserable in their relationships before divorce became so prevalent. But that kind of happiness that people think is going to bring them true meaning--that wasn't always the aim of life in the past. Yes, there were economic reasons, social, reproductive, family reasons [that kept marriages together in the past] that are no longer here now. So if there is going to be an enduring relationship now it has to be much more through intention that it ever was. And a relationship that is not intentional, I think in some way, lacks something human about it.

The modern psychoanalytic view might say that the desire to become whole through another person is an unhealthy desire of someone who needs to work on his or her own soul development. But your thesis in this book seems to say that this desire is very human, having existed throughout the ages, and that this desire to achieve wholeness through union with another person is fine if it is done in a conscious way.

Absolutely. To me, that is what love is for--to help the other person become whole. You can't make me whole but you can help me search and struggle in a way that I can become whole. We can help each other that way. That is what I call in the book "intermediate love." It's in between divine and all too human. It's the love of people who are themselves in between the animal and the angel. [ Human beings] are in a metaphysically difficult situation. We are both animals and angels. That's our passion, that's our glory, that's our sorrow. And we have to help each other in that situation.

people who are themselves in between the animal and the angel. [Human beings] are in a metaphysically difficult situation. We are both animals and angels. That's our passion, that's our glory, that's our sorrow. And we have to help each other in that situation.

As human beings, we seem to have a particularly hard time letting go of our individualism. We have a fear that in falling in love we will lose our "selves." Yet it seems that you describe, and the great spiritual traditions tell us, that losing our ego is the path to the fullest kind of love.

I think in order to experience the joys of falling in love people must lose their individualism, at least temporarily. But for some people there is a fear of submitting to that so they hold back. When love gets them, as it does almost everybody, they ask themselves why they have been holding back so long. So they let go of it and it's beautiful to be free of that. That's a foretaste of what the spiritual traditions are telling us. Romantic love gives us a glimpse of what we have to work for to make [love] a permanent condition for ourselves through a spiritual path. To fall in love is, as the Rabbis used to say, to get a glimpse, a foretaste of paradise. Yes, the individualism that we have to let go of is not really our individual nature. It's kind of a social illusion that our culture forces upon us and we identify ourselves with something which is fundamentally not ourselves, which is alien. You are not what your teachers told you. You are not what your culture tells you. You are something inside. You are a spiritual "I" presence that you can't discover if you identify yourself only with the social self.

You talk in the book about the concept of sustained love which you say calls us "to practice a love that is neither purely passionate nor purely spiritual." What do you mean by that?

Sustained love is love that endures past the seemingly insuperable obstacles that inevitably come in any process. When you first begin to study something, like piano, you start with a wave of enthusiasm and interest and you work at it. But there comes a point in every process where [the enthusiasm] runs down. You say to yourself, "Maybe I don't want to play the piano. Maybe I want to play the flute. Or maybe I want to sing." Often you get a whole new burst of energy when you start something else. That running down [of the initial feeling of passion] is a cosmic law. It's not because of any problem you have. It happens in every situation and if you're really going to be a pianist, you going to have to keep working when the automatic desire to work is no longer there. And when you do that something new comes eventually. It's the same with spiritual development. There is a period in spiritual inner work where the impulse dies down and the person becomes kind of bored and there's a temptation to go somewhere else. And that has to be worked through. The religious or spiritual tradition doesn't make it easy because you have to find something from yourself. In a relationship that happens too. Can you find something in yourself that carries you through even when the desire, the old feeling, is not there?

And that is intention?

Yes. That's where intention comes, right at the point of slowing down. Then when you carry that through you get a whole new burst, a whole new meaning. That's what I mean by sustained love.

You talk about this capacity for selfless love that human beings have and the desire to serve one another through love. Do you believe that this selflessness is the natural state of human beings which is opposed to the modern view that human beings are essentially egoistic? Do you believe that our natural state is to want to give love?

I think so. I think the general view of the human self in modern times is very stupid--to see human beings as just selfish animals with a complicated computer on top of their neck. This is not a sensible view of human nature. In a way, you could say it's realistic because just look at how people behave. Yes, they behave like pigs but that's not because of anything intrinsic in there. But if you go down really beneath the surface to the source, people are fundamentally compassionate and loving. This is part of the essence of the human being. In Eastern traditions and in most of the highly developed mystical traditions, you work at removing the attachment to the ego and all by itself, the love starts appearing. You don't have to put it in. It's all there. The problem with our lives is that it's covered over. It's not something we have to build. It's something we have to uncover. That's the ancient view of the human self. The modern view is a very cynical view.

Why did the modern view take over?

Because I think it's part of a very understandable, realistic correction to some fantasies that were put out by the Church--some unrealistic ideas about human beings being spiritual and having to deny their animal nature, having to deny their normal needs, their normal ego.

Well, the modern view certainly supports the idea of original sin.

Yes. In modern times, psychoanalysis and psychiatry saw how people were suffering from suppressing their normal, physical, sexual needs and trying to treat themselves as higher than they are. [Modern psychoanalysis] corrected an unrealistically spiritual picture of human beings but it went too far and forgot that there is a really deep spirituality. [Psychologists and psychoanalysts] threw out the real greatness of the human being by getting rid of the false greatness. Psychiatry did a great service in making us be able to accept our sexuality, our normal selfish needs but it was blind to the deep, mystical reality in us.

You have a section called "Love and Agitation" in your book where you write, "On the one hand, we are troubled when someone we love or who works with us is not torn up by his or her feelings about us or about what we care for. On the other hand, we are touched by the power of great men and women to radiate an inner collectedness in situations that would bring most people to panic or excesses of zeal." Why do we expect our loved ones to have the same emotional overreactiveness that we are feeling as being a sign of their love for us?

It is part of the illusion of our time -- the deep, hypnotic illusion that we live under -- that to care for anything is to be obsessed. We know ourselves that we have

moments of very deep caring that are very quiet and calm but full of love. We have not been helped to realize that obsessive desire or craving is not really care for another person. It's more neurotic based on our own ego.

That obsessive craving is something that's definitely fueled by our society.

Absolutely. And also in the way that our stories and movies portray people who care for anything--they are always obsessed by it. If you are working in an office and you really care about your job and you're doing it calmly and quietly, your boss is going to say, "What's wrong with you? You don't care about your work!" You have to pretend to be like that to show that you really care!

You talk about ethics as being something that springs from love.

When you really feel love, the things that you have been taught you should do are things you wish to do without pushing yourself, without forcing it. When I really feel care for another person's life, I don't have to force myself to do what needs to be done. I don't feel it's a big sacrifice to go against my wishes and help the other person. You could say in those rare moments that you wish to do what you ought to do--that is, duty and desire fuse. This is very rare. But in those moments, you really do know the meaning of ethics. And then you realize that these ethical rules are meant for people who feel love. Since we don't feel love all the time, we take them as obligations which is okay as long as we realize that we are obeying these ethical rules because they spring from people who have had greater consciousness. They are like scripts from more conscious people and we obey them because we have nothing better to put in their place.

But we don't really understand them.

We don't feel them all the time. I behave ethically because I know it's right because I've experienced it in finer moments. We shouldn't fool ourselves that just because we are obeying rules externally that we are in ourselves transformed ethical people. We must recognize that these ethics are imposed to begin with. We don't fight that too much. But we realize that there is this possibility for an inner revolution where they won't have to be imposed. They will come from the heart. It's natural for us to strive for that. We're not living yet what we're meant to be.

We talk about the ideal of love as just that--an ideal never to be attained because of the vicissitudes of change and attachment. But what I get from what you write is that if we come into the fullness of a sustained love, the ideal is actually being put into practice. So love becomes no longer an ideal that we strive for but an actual reality in our daily lives.

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