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In the Reading, Jacob Needleman talks about what he calls “Real philosophy.” Real philosophy has to do with our ability to withdraw into ourselves from the world of everyday activity and to take a stand within ourselves. It is, he says, a primal “yearning.” It is a “yearning” for Beingness, a yearning for an experience and understanding of our “significance” as one human being among many human beings, our significance as one human being in an immense Universe. By withdrawing and taking a stand within ourselves, we come to the realization that we each have a self with which to stand; that there is an “I” within “me.”. It takes personal effort and mental discipline.

When we take a stand within ourselves, we “feel” ourselves and we form “ideas” about ourselves, about others, about reality, and of our relationship to ourselves, others and reality.

 We learn to take a stand within ourselves and we return to the world as a self with ideas, ideals and values that will not be dominated by the external world of beliefs and expectations of others.

 I want to tell you a story about someone who exemplified Real Philosophy, a person who awakened to herself. In his fascinating novel, Sophie’s World: A Novel About The History Of Philosophy, (1991, English 1995) Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder tells the story of fourteen-year old Sophie Amundsen. She awakens and becomes a conscious young woman as she is exposed to “deep yearning.”

 One day Sophie went to the mailbox and found an envelope addressed to her. It had no stamp on it. It was obviously hand delivered. Inside was a slip of paper. It read:

“Who are you?”

 Sophie went into her house, sat down on a kitchen stool with the mysterious letter in her hand. She was puzzled.

“Who are you?”

 “She had no idea. She was Sophie Amundsen, of course, but who was that?  She had not really figured that out - yet....

She jumped up and went into the bathroom with the strange letter in her hand. She stood in front of the mirror and starred into her own eyes.

‘I am Sophie Amundsen,’ she said.

The girl in the mirror did not react with as much as a twitch. Whatever Sophie did, she did exactly the same. Sophie tried to beat her reflection to it with lightning movement but the other girl was just as fast.”

‘Who are you?’ Sophie asked.

 

She received no response to this either, but felt a momentary confusion as to whether it was she or her reflection who had asked the question.

Sophie pressed her index finger to the nose in the mirror and said, ‘You are me.’

As she got no answer to this, she turned the sentence around and said, ‘I am you.’....

Wasn’t it odd that she didn’t know who she was?.... (Later) 

As she stood outside on the gravel path with the mysterious letter in her hand, the strangest feeling came over her. She felt like a doll that had suddenly been brought to life by the wave of a magic wand.

Wasn’t it extraordinary to be in the world right now, wandering around in a wonderful adventure!”

 This letter, this question, evoked something strange in Sophie. She became conscious of the fact that she is alive in the world. She started to think about being alive and realized that she would not be alive forever. Was there life after death, she wondered. 

Later, she went back to the mailbox and discovered another letter. She tore it open and there was another question on a piece of paper. It read:

“Where does the world come from?”

 “I don’t know, Sophie thought. Surely nobody really knows. And yet - Sophie thought it was a fair question. For the first time in her life she felt it wasn’t right to live in the world without at least inquiring where it came from.”

 Sophie continued to receive letters in her mailbox. She was given a course in philosophy by an anonymous correspondent, a stranger. The novel is about her introduction to the history of Western philosophy and her developing relationship to the philosopher and her growth as a thinking person.

 In the second lesson in philosophy that Sophie received in the mailbox, the mysterious philosopher wrote:

“The only thing we require to be a good philosopher is the faculty of wonder.”...

My concern is that you do not grow up to be one of those people who take the world for granted....

 Sadly it is not only the force of gravity we get used to as we grow up. The world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central - something philosophers try to restore. For somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery.... For various reasons most people get caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background....

So now you must choose, Sophie. Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so?”

 After having received and read the first two installments regarding philosophy, we are told that:

“Sophie was practically in shock....

She had never thought so hard before! She was no longer a child - but she wasn’t really grown up either....

The philosopher had rescued her. No doubt about it. The unknown letter writer had saved her from the triviality of everyday existence.

When (her) Mom got home at five o’clock, Sophie dragged her into the living room and pushed her into an arm-chair.

     ‘Mom - don’t you think it’s astonishing to be alive?’ she began.

Her mother was so surprised that she didn’t answer at first. Sophie was usually doing her homework when she got home.

‘I suppose I do - sometimes.’ she said.

‘Sometimes? Yes, but - don’t you think it’s astonishing that the world exists at all?’

‘Now look, Sophie. Stop talking like that.’...

Sophie saw that the philosopher was right. Grownups took the world for granted. They let themselves be lulled into the enchanted sleep of their humdrum existence once and for all.

‘You’ve just grown so used to the world that nothing surprises you any more.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’.... (Asked her mother)

‘You haven’t gotten yourself mixed up with drugs have you, dear?’....

‘Are you nuts?’ (Sophie) said. ‘That only makes you duller!’

 Sophie’s mother recognized the fact that Sophie was manifesting a change in consciousness and she thought that it might be the result of drugs. The kinds of questions that Sophie asked her mother seem odd to people who don’t ask them. And the people who ask them are perceived as being very odd.

 The novel is the account of the awakening of the philosophical spirit in a young woman. Her name means “wisdom” in Greek. So the title of the book can also be “Wisdom’s World.”

 Sophie’s World is an introduction to the history of philosophy. It provokes the “deep yearning” for “beingness.”

 Based on his study of Socrates, Jacob Needleman, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, contends that:

 “There is a yearning in the human heart that is nourished only by real philosophy and without this nourishment man/woman dies as surely as if he [or she] were deprived of food or air.” The Heart Of Philosophy, p. 3

 Needleman says that this deep yearning is neither known nor honored by our culture and as a consequence it is not nurtured. This yearning is neglected and all but extinguished in the education process and, as a result, people can become objects, things. By not identifying and developing this yearning, we lose touch with our deepest subjectivity, our deepest selves.

 On the basis of my own experience, I think that Needleman means that when the philosophical impulse is not developed, when we do not exercise our ability to think deeply and seriously, the development of our selves, our autonomy, and stance in the world are diminished.

 Deep yearning involves our self-inquiry into the existence of the being of ourselves.

 It is the striving for consciousness of the mystery and awesomeness of being alive in a world. Sophie became conscious of the mystery and the awesomeness of being alive in the world.

 It is the conscious, thoughtful experience of the profundity of being alive.

 It is the creation of personal aspirations that are worthy of our autonomy.

 Getting there involves the study of provocateurs such as Socrates and Needleman. It involves self-study and self-interrogation. It involves hard thinking. It involves reading hard books that challenge our assumptions about ourselves and the reality in which we live.

 Needleman says:

“There is something closer to oneself than religion, something greater than mysticism; more concrete and yet more unknown. There is an aspect of myself that is [prior] to religion, that moves in another direction, that answers to nothing or to no one else but itself. When it is activated, I become quiet; I listen. It is not religious silence; it is not “sweet”; the mind is quiet, but very alive; everything that it knows is now in question, but without fear. In that moment some entirely new movement begins in me, new but strangely familiar; I sense the possibility of breathtaking stability. Ibid, p. 11

 What happens, when we enter this kind of state, is that we experience ourselves as the subjects of our experience. We discover ourselves “thinking” about ourselves and about our experience. We form Ideas about ourselves, and that which is not ourselves. It is a state in which these “ideas” are “felt.” When ideas are “felt” they become guides for our conduct, they become guides for “meaning.” They become convictions, but convictions that may be changed as we continue to explore our deep yearnings.

 The philosopher, the student of the scope and development of human consciousness, Ken Wilbur, wrote a remarkable book entitled Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. He begins with this observation:

“It is FLAT-OUT strange that something - that anything - is happening at all. There was nothing, then a Big Bang, then here we all are. This is extremely weird.”

 He then observed that:

“To [the philosopher Friedrich] Schelling’s burning question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing? there have always been two general answers. The first might be called the philosophy of ‘oops.’ The universe just occurs, there is nothing behind it, it’s all ultimately accidental or random, it just happens - oops!.... 

The other broad answer that has been tendered is that something else is going on: behind the happenstance drama is a deeper or higher or wider pattern, or order, or intelligence. 

There are, of course, many varieties of this “Deeper Order”: the Tao, God, Geist, Maat, Archetypal Forms, Reason, Li, Mahamaya, Brahman, Riga.... they all agree on this: the universe is not what it appears. Something else is going on, something quite other than oops....” (VII)

 We live in the world of “appearances,” external realities, a world of things: plants, animals, houses, tables, chairs, rivers, mountains, cars, the sun, the moon, and other people. Philosophers like Socrates, Needleman, and Sophie’s teacher, challenge us to consider that this world of “things” is not the result of “oops,” that “behind or beneath” all “appearances” is a Deeper Order which exists in and of itself.

 We can become totally absorbed in this external world of things and become estranged from the Deeper Order. We can become so absorbed in the world of things that we don’t even ask ourselves if it has any meaning beyond our mastering of it. It can become entirely mundane and as a result our lives can become mundane.

Behind the appearances is a world that we can penetrate with the power of mind. The power of philosophy lies in the power of self-interrogation regarding the serious questions about life that we all ask from time to time.

 Why is there something rather than nothing?

What is real?

What is love?

To what end or purpose ought I to devote my life?

What is “The Good”?

What is justice?

What is the cause of pain and suffering?

Is “Something else going on” other than the material reality which we experience?

What is this “Something else”?

How can I enter deeply into my self?

When I enter into my self, what am I experiencing?

Am I connected, am I related to a Deeper Order?

If so, what does it mean, what does it imply for my lived life?

Who am I?

 These are hard questions. They are questions that make us uncomfortable, sometimes angry; especially if they begin to challenge our way of being, our way of living. 

Philosophers are a threat and a pain in the conscience to many people because they question conventional assumptions and conventional wisdom. They question motives and behavior.

 For example, Socrates believed that true happiness, not fleeting happiness, is to be found in what he called the perfection of the soul. He maintained that all other ends, purposes, all other strivings and desires are of no value in themselves. Only self-development is a worthy end. The unexamined life is not worth living. 

In order to develop the self, knowledge is required. But, it is not knowledge about things. It is insight, seeing within, into the nature of that which we truly need as human beings. From time to time we ask ourselves whether or not that for which we seem to be living is really worth our efforts?

 People pursue happiness in three distinct ways.

Some people identify happiness with the pursuit of pleasure. 

Some people identify happiness with economic success and social status.

 Then there are others who seek knowledge, wisdom and self-understanding; insight, experience and a relationship with the Deeper Order, the “Something else which is going on, something quite other than the oops.”

 Needleman tells us that the yearning of the human heart is a:

“part of the self that seeks something other than the satisfaction of material or psycho- social desires... [It] encourages us to attend more carefully to those seemingly random and disconnected moments in life when a new feeling breaks through - the feeling of wonder, or profound and impersonal doubt brought about through contact with immense forces of nature or the overwhelming disappointments and sufferings of human existence. Without such a guiding idea, these moments go by without being recognized for what they are: signs of another force of being within us calling us to us.” (p. 55)

 It is probably no surprise when I say that I believe that

the fundamental challenge and task of a Unitarian Universalist Church is: to evoke in us the experience of deep yearning, to develop our capacity to activate it, to explore if the universe is the result of oops.

Or, if something else is going on? 

If there is another force of being within us calling to us, that we can feel, touch, know, love, and live!

The most remarkable thing that can happen in us is to experience ourselves as unique humon beings who have intrinsic value; to recognize our potential for growth, and to appreciate the mystery of life and the mystery of death.

 As life flows in and through us, it follows a path it could not have followed had we not come into existence. We bear the responsibility for the life we are and for the shape we give it.

 We are life’s battalion building a bridge over the abyss of meaninglessness, despair, ugliness, ignorance, and lovelessness!