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Informationen zum Autor 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 is the author of several bestselling books, including Money and the Meaning of Life, A Little Book on Love, and The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. Klappentext In Time and the Soul Jacob Needleman uses stories-of a middle-aged psychiatrist going back in time to encounter his younger self; of a mysterious meeting in the Central Asian desert; of the mystic master Hermes Trimegistus; as well as stories from the Bhagavad-Gita! the Bible! and other wisdom traditions-to illuminate the great mystery of time and to help us resolve our increasingly dysfunctional relationship to it. Nearly everyone feels stress and anxiety over what's become known as time poverty. "Time management" techniques treat these symptoms by making our busyness more efficient! but not the underlying cause. Needleman shows that we can get more out of time by breaking free of our illusions about it. He helps us experience time more purposefully and meaningfully. He provides parables! reflections! and a unique mental exercise to give us a new understanding of time. By transforming the way we understand and experience time! this powerful book gives us the equanimity and perspective we need to make the most of the time we are given. "A tranquil heart!" Needleman writes!"is never defeated by time." TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . . 1 —William Wordsworth The question of our relationship to time is both a mystery and a problem. It calls to us from the deepest recesses of the human heart. And it bedevils us on all the surfaces of our everyday life. At the deeper levels, in front of the mystery of time, we are mortal beings solemnly aware of our finitude—longing, perhaps, for that in ourselves which partakes of the eternal. But at the surface levels of ourselves, in front of the problem of time, we are like frantic puppets trying to manage the influences of the past, the threats and promises of the future and the tense demands of the ever-diminishing present moment. The mystery of time has the power to call us quietly back to ourselves and toward our essential freedom and humanness. The problem of time, on the other hand, agitates us and “lays waste our powers.” 2 In 1997, when this book was first published, the uniquely modern form of the problem of time—the astonishing fact that the conditions of contemporary life are bleeding meaningful time out of our lives—had already begun to assume epidemic proportions. Almost all of us—including even young children—were being afflicted by this new poverty, this time-poverty. Awash in material goods, awash in new and ingenious forms of money and their ever-darkening shadow of debt, whipped faster and faster by advancing technology—and all the while telling ourselves we were better off than ever before—we began to realize, dimly at first, that we were no longer living our lives. We began to see that our lives were living us. And we began to suspect that our relationship to time had become so toxic precisely because we had forgotten how to bring to our day-to-day lives the essential question of who and what a human being is and is meant to be. We had lost touch with the mystery of time—that is to say, the mystery of our humanness, our being, our life and death. 3 This edition seeks to explore what it means to allow the mystery of time to irrigate our parched and driven lives. My fundamental premise is that the pathology of our relationship to time can be healed only as we allow ourselves to be penetrated by t...
