In his most deeply personal work, religious scholar Needleman cuts a clear path through today's clamorous debates over the existence of God, illuminating an entirely new way of approaching the question of how to understand a higher power. In this new book, philosopher Jacob Needleman - whose voice and ideas have done so much to open the West to esoteric and Eastern religious ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - intimately considers humanity's most vital question: What is God?Needleman begins by taking us more than a half century into the past, to his own experience as a brilliant, promising, Ivyeducated student of philosophy - atheistic, existential, and unwilling to blindly accept childish religiosity. But an unsettling meeting with the venerated Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki, combined with the sudden need to accept a dreary position teaching the philosophy of religion, forced the young academician to look more closely at the religious ideas he had once thought dead.