The Wisdom of Love: Toward a Shared Inner Life

by Jacob Needleman

“…Who can deny that our world is starved for a new understanding of love, of what it means to live together and work at love and not give up?” What is the antidote to romantic love that all too often exhausts itself over night? Might it be to join with a partner in a spiritual search? “Love to . . . awaken us: Body and Soul to a greater unknown.” Further, what is the work which will sustain a love over a lifetime? By searching for the sacred with our lover we might well find the divine within them. Philosopher and teacher Jacob Needleman suggests love can be a reflection of our spiritual being. He asserts that by the time “we are living together something beyond passion is required;” something intentional and conscious is needed.

In The Wisdom of Love, philosopher Jacob Needleman draws wisdom from myth, religion, philosophy and sacred poetry in an exploration of that which brings two people together in love — of what love is, why we need to give it and receive it, and how it can be sustained beyond the passion and mystery that first draws us together.

Genres: Philosophy, Love

127 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, former Visiting Professor at Duxx Graduate School of Business Leadership in Monterrey, Mexico, and former Director of the Center for the study of New Religions at The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He was educated in philosophy at Harvard, Yale and the University of Freiburg, Germany. He has also served as Research Associate at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, as a Research Fellow at Union Theological Seminary, as Adjunct Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of California Medical School and as guest Professor of Religious Studies at the Sorbonne, Paris (1992).

Reviews

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main idea here is Professor Needleman's concept of "intermediate love". This is the idea that while we are not capable of fully engaging in sustained unconditional love, the closest we can come is to join with someone else in a shared pursuit of it, and recognize that both parties are in the same place of yearning and striving for complete wholeness, but being unable to fully manifest it.

The professor describes how the peak experience of being "in love" gives us a brief glimpse of the best of ourselves, our ability to see the best in other people, and in the world as a whole. In this way, the experience is a generous burst of grace that shows us what we could be capable of as fully-developed images of the Divine. Needleman's deep appreciation of the place that this rare, fleeting gift has in the larger human experience enables him to also gracefully illustrate how it can be a powerful prelude that translates to something deeper, more deliberate, richer, and more sustainable.

I've found that applying the "intermediate love" concepts herein make it easier to have an attitude of understanding towards other people, as well as more patience with myself. The book is also quite sympathetic and soothing to the disappointment of failed relationships... at least the one I had just experienced when reading it. "The Wisdom of Love" seemed perfect for the time and place that it entered my life.

All in all, a short, surprisingly beautiful read!

[John Everard Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a small but powerful book. Well written. It leads the reader through a process that identifies the connection between physical love and spiritual love. It links our human awareness of our search for purpose and identity and our life in this world in relationships. The introduction defines the purpose of the book as: "Amid everything that our culture suggest to us about love, there is a new understanding of what it means to hold love, to sustain love, so that it serves as more than a blazing transient glimpse of happiness; so that it supports the journey toward the birth within ourselves of a new and more authentic humanity". While this is a new understanding it is rooted in ancient traditions, wisdom teachings and religions.

I am a retired Christian minister who is developing a course on love for the church. This book could be a required text for such a course. It speaks about the inner life and our human desire to connect with love as the way of being in the world. In the book he leads us to what he calls an "intermediate love", a union of the physical and the spiritual. And names the fact that our world does not recognize the inner path nor encourage us to seek it. But humanity and relationships can only thrive if we recognize the life that is "holy" is found in the search for and connection to our inner life. It is deeper meaning, not happiness, that human beings are striving for. But we settle for less because we are not familiar with the inner life. This is only discovered through struggle and intention to discover this dimension in us.
Through eleven chapters Neddleman guides us to explore the deeper meaning of love and to understand what the practice of loving another is all about.
This is a book that I will read again (and again?) so I can better communicate my experience of love as he does so well in this book.

[Guy Galzerano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophy of Love and Staying in Love.

[Cathy]

Recommended by my minister, Kathleen