[Last Sunday, Jacob Needleman shared some touching and insightful thoughts at our Money + Transformation circle.  Below is a lightly edited transcript of his opening remarks ...]

Thank you. I feel I'm uniquely qualified to share since I don't really understand this question of money -- which is why I wrote a whole book about it. [Laughs] I'm a philosopher or a professor of philosophy, and that means I've made my life, my career, trying to contemplate and penetrate what I have come to call -- the great questions of the heart. Questions that are, in a way, ultimate and that define us as people, as human beings. Questions that are not answerable to science or even by many of the religions that we go to. Questions such as, "Who am I? What am I? Why do we suffer? What can we know? Why is there evil?"

I've come to the sense that the we human beings have two fundamental turns forces within us. One is to function well and honorably in this world, this life, this material world -- spending, materiality, family, success, health, community. Another current, another aspect of ourselves, another part of our human nature is our quest for what we call inner faith transformation or transcendence or openness to a higher reality within us and the universe. These two natures define us. And we're here on earth to come to a balance between the two, each on its proper role. That's where meaning comes in. The meaning of our life seems to be, putting it very briefly, is when we can stand in between those two fundamentally, seemingly contradictory, elements of our human nature, and allow them to be balanced in some way such that the lower, outward, and external forces serves the inner and the higher, into a third reality where a human beings is full. That was inquiry that I considered to be ultimate in my books, my teachings as a professor, and in my personal life.

I'd like to tell a couple stories to illustrate my search for that transformation, across the great spiritual teachings of the world, and my exploration of what's possible for a human being.

When I started in the university, and started studying philosophy, not really understanding what it was although having tasted it when I was young, and I came back to my family in the first year of college. I was from a standard Jewish family, not very religious, but very traditional, which meant that I was obliged to become a doctor, metaphysically and socially. [Laughs] Although I loved science and biology, I had to risk telling my parents, especially my father, that I've decided to become a professor of philosophy. Neither of my parents went to college, but my father -- a very strong physical man -- heard and his eyes went slightly crossed. He wanted to know what a philosopher does for a living, and I told him we tried to contemplate the ultimate questions of why we're here on earth, what our life is for, does God exist. And his eyes got closer and closer. He said, "Can't you do that and also be a banker?" [Laughs]

My mother, later on, when I got my PhD at the university, and there was a party for a Dr. Needleman, she called out to the crowd, "Oh, he's not the kind of the doctor that does anybody any good." She was a very loving person, by the way. But at this party, everybody was startled and then everybody laughed. I didn't laugh, but I loved her anyway.

Now I like to skip to something that is very intimate -- and maybe it's Mr. Buddha there (pointing to the Buddha statue), but somehow I find myself become trusting in this environment.

Money in our modern world, I still fundamentally believe, is the principle of technology for organizing our outer life, our life in the world. And it's a mystery, or rather it is startling, that no one has really helped many of us to understand the actual role of money in the search for transformation for contact with God, whatever language you want to refer to the divine.

That gave a definite orientation toward my own spiritual practice, which meant that I would try to start observing how I actually am with money before I started to try to be different with it, or before I lost myself in trying to change my way with dealing with money. I came from a family where my father and his parents were tremendously frightened about money, and concerned about money, having come over from Russia, the Ukraine, and being here in this world and terrified themselves. They were devoted to the functioning in a way that every penny counted and there was fear about money in my father's bones. I grew up surrounded by that fear. When I told them that I was becoming a philosopher, and every time I would come back and talk about philosophy, and finally, and especially when I became a professor of philosophy, I came home very proud of myself and wanted to show them I've written a book about philosophy and various things, and his response was almost always: "How much do you earn?"

It shook me. I didn't really want to say anything else.

I was still discovering meaning, opening ideas, facing dogma questions, and great ideas from ancient men, ancient traditions in the East and West, but no matter what I would do and no matter how well my career went, every time I came back home, my father's first question was, "How much do you earn?"

It really annoyed the hell out of me, and it hurt me. Time went on, lots of time, almost 50 years or more, and he was lonely, living alone with severe diabetes. My mother had died, he had finally gone to an elder care home, and his illness was getting bad. Around the age of 87, he was in the hospital, and my brother and I went to visit him. The doctors told us, "Looks like we're going to have to amputate." He had been through so much. My brother and I talked to each other, we went outside for a long time, and we decided it's unbearable for him to have to face this. We were going to let him, have to let him, go because he was very, very weak.

You can see why this is rather intimate.

As I was about to leave to go back, as he was in the hospital bed in pain, I whispered in his ear, something I have never been able to say: "I love you, Dad." I never have been able to say that to him.

He looked at me very quietly and said, "How much do you earn?"

I was so shaken by that. I couldn't believe it. I kissed him and I left.

As I was going back home, I realized that was his way of loving. All the posture he had for expressing love was around money; that was part of his life, and it washed everything clean.

Now I tell that story, which I've never told in public before, but I tell it today because I wanted to raise a deeper question. When we are faced with uncertainty, we can respond in two ways -- one as problems to be solved, and the other as questions to be lived. We sometimes short circuit that great distinction, that our problem requires our functions, our thinking, our physical actions, our organizational ability, our emotional sensitivity, but a question is something that draws us inward, that we need to draw us inward, and open to our truth of ourselves, true impressions of ourselves so that eventually the questions become mysteries.

A mystery is an unknown that attracts another energy into us if we can live with it. There's a deeper mystery with money, that centers around our fundamental human nature. It has to do with desire, in this world and culture. Money was a particular system here in the Western world, especially America, which was created largely by men and women, by certain men, to find some problem and to solve that problem. In Europe, for example, the concern was murder and warfare and brutal life.

Many wondered if there was something that can counter what they call "passions", the attachments and craziness -- and ego, really -- that they understood was causing the wars. And they created a system that involved wealth, money, possessions, status ... what they called "interests" as opposed to "passions". The passions were destroying people. Was there something in human nature, without trying to make everybody into a saint, that could counter the force of the passions? There was the "interests", which became what we call capitalism. This capitalism was originated to make those forces counter the destructive passions.

[Is there another, better way, to counter the passions?] I'm opening a question, that I hope contributes to our circle, and also because it certainly need an answer.