A Mistake of Immense Proportion

by Jacob Needleman

Since the beginning of recorded history, man has been haunted by the intimation that he lives in a world of mere appearances. In every teaching and spiritual philosophy of the past, we find the idea that whatever happens to us, for good or ill, is brought about by deeper forces behind the world that seems so real to us. We are further told that this real world is not accessible to the senses or understandable by the ordinary mind.

But, and this is a point that is not usually understood, we live in a world of inner appearances as well. We are not what we perceive ourselves to be. There is another identity, our real self, hidden behind the self that we believe ourselves to be.

It is only through awakening to this deeper self within that we can penetrate behind the veil of appearances and make contact with a truer world outside of ourselves. It is because we live on the surface of ourselves that we live on the surface of the greater world, never participating—except in rare moments which do not last and which are not understood—in the wholeness of reality.

It is this all-important second aspect of the ancient wisdom, the aspect that speaks of our inner world, that modern thought has been blind to. And the question about the meaning of life is inextricably linked to the need for contact with the real self beneath the surface of our everyday thoughts, emotions, and sensations.

Without this contact, the external world of appearances assumes for us the proportions of an overwhelmingly compelling force. We cannot see the real world because we are not in contact with the deeper powers of thought and sensing within ourselves that could perceive it. Because of this, it is inevitable that we experience the external world as the strongest force in our lives. This is the meaning and the origin of materialism.

The error, or, to use Christian language, the “sin” of materialism, has at its root nothing to do with greed or possessiveness. Nor does it involve, at its root, some philosophical view about matter and spirit in their usual meanings. No, the error of materialism is an error of reality perception, based on a lack of experiential contact with the inner world. What we know as greed and possessiveness, with their attendant traits of cruelty and human exploitation, are results of this ignorance of the inner world. We turn to the superficially perceived outer world for that which can only be obtained through deep access to the inner self.

Materialism is not a “sin”; it is a mistake.

But a mistake of immense proportions and with deadly consequences. It is like searching for water on the surface of the moon to search for meaning in the external world. Like grasping a picture of food and trying to eat it. Not only meaning, but also health, safety, service, love, and power can be obtained only through turning to reality. The unreal world can never yield these things to man.

Jacob Needleman is an American philosopher, author, and religious scholar. This reading was excerpted from his book, Money and Meaning of Life, which is also summarized in this interview on Bill Moyers. 

https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=1088

Why I hate Hemingway

A friend whom I admire and love very deeply once suggested that Hemingway was perhaps the greatest of American writers, but in danger of becoming unappreciated. He used spare language. I hadn’t read him in two decades, so I went out and bought The Sun Also Rises at the Green Apple second-hand book store in the avenues, and began. I have a confession: after page 12, I began speed reading, hoping to end the pain as quickly as possible. I gave up drinking years ago, but if there'd been a bottle handy, I might have begun self-medication.

That old goat—he was young then—used Paris as a stage set. Maybe that whole Lost Generation did. America was getting too complicated and too heartless to coddle their mixed-up lives. They were starved, and America was getting too greedy to slow down enough to read and take in the complexity of words, much less their lives. Their words. Gertrude, herself of few words, and her clique have trained us who love words to visit Paris as often as we can afford the luxury, so we can feel guilty, and, always facing that thick and solid writers’ block, continue to be stymied because we’ve used every excuse money could buy to avoid the language of our hearts. All over again and then again. Guilty for using too many words for love. Make sure to buy those overpriced cards with sticky colors that hang from the revolving racks along the Seine. That is really as close we’re going to get to the Parisians because we can never really be French—we’ve been warned over and over. They won’t let us, but we can still dream. When we hit the grand lotto and buy that flat, we can wake up every morning, knowing that we don’t belong, but if we could belong, this would be the place to do it. Be stymied in style.



In the end, I feel like you and all you self-righteous ex-pats have bullied and flattened my emotional life. But back to Hemingway, that all-American bullied my emotional life. Me, personally, when I opened his book. I repeated myself. I must be carrying a grudge. I used too many words. It struck deep. What is it? I love Paris too. I’ve visited many of the same places. The tour guide in me can pull up some data or hearsay that explains why this is there, and that there seems somewhat off because it’s where someone whose name will never be forgotten, but I can’t remember, was murdered or made a saint or perhaps both, while over there is that famous view that one of the kings so fancied that he made sure that only those he favored could join his viewing party. Until he lost his head over there. And this is where De Haussman needed to keep the line straight. If you think that’s urban beauty, do I have a surprise for you. The man had only a ruler and a straightedge on the desk when he laid out the plan; he couldn’t add up numbers when it came to paying the bills, but I shouldn’t make the story too complex. Before we let it get too real, let’s distract ourselves: here is the best place to buy the authentic onion soup because the real cheap guide books assure us that the owners are actually not crafty thieves and pickpockets; there are some who need to steal from you to pay the landlords, who are the only people making a buck anyway. And the writers of those cheap tourist guides need to pay for their dinner too. Maybe we’ve just lined up for an endless game of emotional pickpocket to keep our fantasies alive.

It’s like that, Paris. Emotions run deep. If you don’t believe me, go visit the home of Balzac in the 16th, which was way out of town when he himself tried to throw up a wall to escape the tyranny of the French. But don’t read him. It gets too real at a slow and leisurely pace.

They’re like that, the words. Back to Hemingway, M.F.K. Fisher famously observed that Ernest used words with such precision that each one seemed "to have been savoured and then spat out," as if he were testing their weight and texture like a piece of food or wine. I’ll go with the spat-out part. Writing in the most legendary part of the Left Bank, carefully, meticulously, that’s the way he treats language. He claims—I hesitate to use the word protest, although that’s accurate, but I needn’t be too fussy, maybe a bit too theatrical for a man who preferred bull fighting over opera: he says he was looking for the simplest, most direct word pointing. He would spend hours circling, underlining, substituting, crossing out, never satisfied, questioning because “it’s not exactly right,” but give him time, while he, the perverse old pickpocket, is frisking you for that last centilla of emotion he can rip off to throw in the ring. No wonder I think I have to speed-read his books. Anything less would be a death sentence.

I imagine he lined up poets, read them, and pronounced sentence.

Lorca, that silly little queen. He had no guts; he cowered. Just shoot the little pansy. But my enemies did it for me, which should give me second thoughts if it doesn’t exceed my word allotment.

Whitman, falling in love with ambulance drivers, glad I missed you and your mystical perversion of the mother tongue. Who the fuck gave you the right to make up so many words to show that it's all one world? You get hung. May you sputter and teach us all a lesson.

Dali, a total weirdo, Gertrude kept him around to keep the rest from wildly exuberant explosions of self-indulgence. He should be choked with coarse pubic hair.

This has stopped being fun, which is what Hemingway must have said at some point, too.

Ernest Hemingway, 1952.Photograph by Earl Theisen/Getty

The Gift of Tears—For my Mother, Leona Carroll

It is May 10th, 2026, Mother's Day, and I am reposting this piece that I wrote in 2007 about my mother, Leona Carroll Ireland. I dedicate it to you, Mother, and to all our mothers.

I woke up this morning missing my mother, who has been dead for several years. Given the contentious quality of our relationship for most of our 60 years together, I am surprised that oftentimes I find tears in my eyes when I think of her. I still remember phone calls where she slammed down the receiver, long periods of not speaking—her cold punishment for my seemingly uncooperative nature—her steely resolve that by the force of her will, I was going to get straight somehow, and marry. We were locked in a stalemate for almost 20 years.

Then, a few short years before she died, I got really lucky, or was blessed, when I was able to touch the pain her actions tried to mask. That took away their power to hurt and allowed me to experience a kind of love that I could not have imagined.

This is what I write about this Mother’s Day morning.

"A painted cake doesn't satisfy hunger."

There is a famous story in Zen about a monk, Hsiang-yen, who, by most standards applied to monks, was a failure. He worked away in the monastery of his teacher, expecting nothing—and he got nothing; he sat long hours in meditation—nothing; he did rounds of begging—right, again only scraps; he got thrown out of the hojo every time he presented himself before his teacher to check out how he was doing because he didn’t seem to be absorbing much. A hopeless case.

After many years of getting nowhere, when his teacher died, convinced that realization was beyond his capabilities, he retired to a remote temple where he tended the teacher’s grave. One day, the story continues, as he was raking the stones in the orderly zen garden (I like to imagine the ones you see in the fancy books with perfectly ordered lines in the rock), a small stone bounced off the garden wall with a Ping! Just that sound, and in a tumble, his mind gulped in all his training in a single instant. And he got his life.

Even someone who has never practiced long days of meditation can understand the appeal of Hsiang-Yen's story. Everyone I know has some dilemma like this in his or her life. For me, my relationship with my mother was a huge conundrum.

I have flown to Tucson to be with my mother after her first serious heart episode. It is decided that she get a pacemaker; that the doctor electrically jolt her heart, and, hopefully, restore a normal rhythm. Then the elements of a really bad melodrama started to unfold—my father disappeared for several days when he can’t take anymore, my mother brawled with her sister and a pretty buffed nursing attendant as she tried to put on her clothes to leave to go out into the street and hail a cab to take her home given that no one in her family seemed willing to obey her command and return her to a normal life. Eventually, a really well-trained and compassionate case manager was the voice of calm, and the mother agreed to the procedure. The drama to follow can be a quick note in the margin—further refusal on the operating table; family crisis; harsh words exchanged in anger; the heart specialist looks like the 14-year prodigy, Doogie Howser, M.D., on the TV (I’m not kidding. He really did look like a teenager). I started to laugh, . . . this kid is going to thread electrodes through the arteries to my mother’s heart? What is she going to think? She thinks he’s cute and refuses his treatment. Back to square one. That evening, we will try again.

Before her surgery, she can have no food; even water is restricted—only small ice shavings. I hold a plastic cup and gently spoon the shavings on her tongue. She chews, sucks, and swallows with smiles. I hear the ice click against the side of the plastic cup as I scoop it up. I use every bit of all my long zen training just to be with my mother for what might be her last moments of life—just her, just this spoonful, just this ice, just my breath and hers, just her pleasure in ice and water. It is very sweet, and I feel like the good son. If nothing else about Zen, it does train you to be present in the moment. And that moment will have to be enough for this particular gay son after many long years of feeling outcast and abused. Yes, I decide it will be enough.

The medical procedure went as well as any scripted denouement on the Doogie Howser TV show. You couldn’t hope for more: the patient got well; the family crisis was temporarily resolved when the stubborn mother agreed to go to the nursing home; the father returned, shaken, humbled but unharmed, forgiven and loved; the gentle sister has taken over managing the mother’s care. And I boarded Frontier Airlines to return to San Francisco.

After the exchange of pleasantries, I discovered that my seatmates were going to San Francisco to be reunited with their birth mother, whom they had never met (how could I make this up?), and I told them that I had been at my mother’s sickbed.

We are in flight. Staring out the window as we flew over the Rockies, across the desert, and into the sky over Death Valley, I lapsed into a brown study, mesmerized by the world's wonder. The flight attendant offered me a second Diet Coke with ice. My orphaned seatmates passed the offering from seat to seat. I took a big gulp, and as I swirled the ice around the cup, it clinked against the edge. In an instant, my mind tumbles and I am no longer "me" in a plane over Death Valley, but I am in my mother’s life—I mean, really, not some theoretical proposition—all of it, her hopes, her pain, her struggles, her fear, her birth her death, and I burst into tears and sob. My orphan seatmate understands something about finding mothers: she just reaches out and gently touches my arm, holding me connected to the breathing world as my mind flies away. Did I thank her enough? Any trace of resentment, regret, bitterness, or recrimination about the way my mother treated me at any time in our lives together evaporates. She is just my mother, and I am finally able to enter into the mystery and wonder of being a son.

The plane lands in San Francisco. I mumble good-bye to my seatmates, where the mother that gave them birth is waiting at the gate. I wish them well, and I walk back into my life, praying that everybody be lucky enough to find out who their mothers really are, to be able to step into their lives, and cry when they are gone.

My Personal "Studia Paedagogica Ignatiana"

Here is an index of many pages. They are links, and I have sorted them. If a title appeals to you, just click. I will not be hurt if you close it immediately. Most were written as part of a conversation with a group of former Jesuits, Los Companeros.


"Finding God in All Things" by Bonnie Johnson Shurman

A Buddhist Looks at the Arguments for the Existence of God

A Meditation on Meditation by James Ismael Ford

An Open Letter to Hans Küng

August 6th, 1945, Carrying the Flame

Beware of Lounge Chair Zazen

Big Changes for Jesuit Spirituality

Bob Drinan and I design a future for the Jesuits

Bob Hoffman's Dirty Secrets

Bob Hoffman's Dirty Secrets, Part 2

Buddha, S.J., Francis Xavier meets a Zen Roshi

Call it by its correct name: Lying

Calling Out the Archbishop

Christology, Science Fiction, and Nicaea

Christopher Hitchens vs. the Blessed Venerable Unassailable Saint Mātā-ji, aka Mother Teresa

Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

Did I miss Holy Week completely?

Don't Ask, Don't Tell—A Jesuit Strategy

Drinan and I design a future for the Jesuits

Driving in India as Spiritual Practice

Enneagram Bibliography

Father God, S.J.

Foggy Father Ed McKinnon

Further Notes on Jesuit Zen Adepts

Goa, Saint Francis, and Me

Head versus Heart, Faith and Reason, Reason and the Emotions

How does the past become the past? Therapy, Jesus and Zen

How this Jesuit became Buddhist

I have dinner with an Old Church Bishop

I met Frederick Copleston

Ignatius’s "Discernment of Spirits" as Emotional Intelligence

In honor of Mahatma Gandhi

In memory of Tom Marshall, S.J

In the Cave of Sister Mary Kevin, Ursuline

Is the Catholic Church a sinking ship?

Issan’s Drinking Buddies Find all 108 Beads of his Mala

Looking at The Particular Examen of Saint Ignatius with Fresh Eyes

Looking for Faith, a Contrary position

My friendship with an Anglo-Catholic Bishop

Notes on Jesuit Zen Adepts & other Christian Zen Masters

Occam’s Razor of Emotional Discernment

Rebel Mentor, A Conversation with Robert Brophy, Ph.D.

Reflections on the Feast of the Assumption

Reforming the Roman Curia is like trying to teach an elephant ballet

Roshi Ignatius on Planting Buddhism in the West

Schism Schmisum--

Sister Jacinta, the Reality of Women Priests

Sister Kuon Elaine MacInnes Roshi

Stepping Out From Under the Shadow of God

Suntne Angeli?

Taking about talking about God

Taking the Next Step: A Note on Activism as a Spiritual Practice

The Beginnings of a Christian-Zen Bibliography

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris Fire: A Return to Faith

The Christian Church and Slavery

The Clang Birds

The Cosmic Coincidental Control Center may be at work.

The Dynamism of Desire, A Book Conversation

The House that Aristotle built and Aquinas renovated

The Indian Tomb of Jesus

The innocent world of the cloister—celibacy, sex, and art

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram, Bob Ochs, S.J.

The Meanderings of Francis Xavier

The Pope's baritone

The Realm of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius

Trapped by Life

Ty and I sing at a Latin high mass

Vatican 1 was a colossal mistake.

What Compels Belief?

What would Kaiser be writing these days?

When the Sirens of Holy Hill called to me

Women in the Church

Writing that Can Change the World

Yogi CM Chen, Bob Ochs and Me