The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith
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because that energizes us and makes us feel good.” To hell with that line of thought! The question isn't what revs us up and makes us feel good, but what is true.
BENEKE And your intuitive discernment, your jnanic faculty as you call it, tells you that the universe is perfect.
SMITH Yes, but I don't rely solely or even primarily on my own intuition here. The chief reason I accept it is that it conforms to “the winnowed wisdom of the human race,” as I like to think of the enduring religions in their convergent metaphysical claims. The word wisdom needs to be qualified, though. Not everything in the “wisdom traditions” is wise. Modern science has retired their cosmologies; and their social formulas—master/slave, gender relations, and the like—must constantly be reviewed in the light of historical changes and our continuing search for justice. It is their convergent vision of ultimate reality, the Big Picture, that impresses me more than any of the alternatives that modernity has produced.
BENEKE Could you tell us precisely what you experience when you “intuitively discern” the perfection of things?
SMITH Something like Plato's experience when he said, “First a shudder runs through you, and then the old awe steals over you.” I would not mind stopping with that, but other sensations can be added. Excitement. Exhilaration. Confidence. Selflessness and compassion. Peace.
BENEKE Underlying religion is the problem of death. Socrates defined philosophy as practice in the art of dying. You embody the traditional notion of the philosopher as a seeker of wisdom, someone who is concerned with the great questions of life. What do you think happens when we die?
SMITH I need to hesitate for a moment, for this is another place where it's easy to sound glib. The only honest answer is, Who knows? This is the ultimate mystery. Still, the mind keeps searching for answers, or at least for insights.
To pass into death is an adventure, for sure. Near the moment of his passing, Henry James said, “This is the distinguished moment.” What the passage does is to raise again the question of final perfection. I believe in universal salvation, which is to say that everyone eventually comes to something like Dante's beatific vision, which phases out of time into the Eternal Now. That term isn't easy to understand. I have heard even theologians deride eternity as boring. That flagrantly misrepresents the concept. Boredom presupposes time that endures without changes, whereas eternity is outside of time.
BENEKE Boredom is when time is a weight burdening you, and you want to get rid of it.
SMITH Exactly, which is why it could not possibly characterize eternity. There are, however, two conjectures as to what the soul experiences in eternity. We must keep in mind that we are out of our depth here, and that these are what Plato would call no more than “likely tales,” that is, human imagination's best stab at the mystery. One conjecture is dualistic. Here the soul retains its separateness and beholds, timelessly, the Glory, in keeping with Ramakrishna's dictum, “I want to taste sugar, not be sugar.” In the nondualist version, what the soul beholds is so overwhelming that it commands the soul's complete attention, all 100 percent of it. With zero attention left for itself, that self drops from sight, leaving only what its attention is fixed on. As the Hindus say, “The dewdrop has slipped into the shining sea.”
BENEKE This sounds like the German mystic Meister Eckhart saying that “the eye through which God sees us is the eye through which we see God.”
SMITH You have it word perfect, though I am still not sure I understand what those words say. Something like what I was saying, I suppose. All the traditions make the point, though, that unless you are the rare case of a Hindu or Buddhist nonreturner, your spiritual work is not complete when you “drop the body,” as Indians refer to death. Something remains to be done. Hindus and Buddhists say that something gets accomplished in this same world in the new bodies into which they reincarnate. The Abrahamic religions, on the other hand—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—defer that further work on other planes: purgatory, hell, or other bardos, to borrow Tibetan vocabulary. The similarity that underlies these different imageries is quite apparent.
In the period immediately after death there may be a lot of confusion and bewilderment. Swedenborg thought that the first job old-timers in heaven had respecting newcomers was to convince them that they were dead. (I find the thought that heaven is that much like Stockholm rather charming, but also fanciful.) But there are also indications from psychical research—which I don't totally dismiss, though you have to step carefully. There are souls on the other side that are as confused as we are. Channelers and mediums beware! A lot of static gets mixed into the messages. Some souls may even decompose into fragmented residues. The intermediate realm between heaven and earth may be a real mess.
BENEKE Do you think channeling—spirits running through people—provides evidence of the spirit world, a realm beyond the physical?
SMITH There is no conclusive proof that convinces the Bay Area skeptics. Still, Plato took his to his metaxy, his “intermediate realm,” which housed spirits like Eros, and Socrates's daimon, who never told him what to do but warned him what not to do. Plato took the spirit realm seriously, and I am inclined to do so also. I treat shamanism, for example, with respect. Roger Walsh's book The Spirit of Shamanism finesses the questions of whether the shamans’ “allies” are a part of their own psyches or exist objectively apart from them. But whatever the geography of the case, in spiritual matters, space never functions as more than a metaphor for difference. Walsh too, as a professor of psychiatry, takes shamanism seriously. Wherever we choose to position them, shamanic “allies” are objectively other than the shamans’ conscious minds, and they function accordingly. By the way, shamans appear in the oldest cave drawings we have, which date back about twenty thousand years, and suggest that shamanism may be humankind's oldest religion.
BENEKE The conventional way to dismiss all this is to say that consciousness is a product of the brain; you alter the brain in certain ways, and you alter consciousness. When the brain stops functioning, consciousness stops.
SMITH That could be the case, but I consider it a prejudice of minds that I have come to believe that what we can get our hands on is most real. My reaction to it is like T. S. Eliot's on reading Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship. He said it left him with no idea where the truth lay except that it had to be in the opposite direction from the book in hand.
I find it most interesting that the science that saddled us with reductionistic materialism in its early centuries is now going beyond that position. Quantum mechanics is telling us that the universe of space, time, and matter derives from something that exceeds those matrices. Whether or not that Primordial X is conscious, as religion holds, science cannot say. But at least materialism is now old hat.
BENEKE Noam Chomsky talks about how no one expects a cat to do algebra; similarly, there is every reason to suppose that there are fundamental laws of the universe that humans will never be able to know because of our cognitive limitations. Perhaps our ignorance is inexorable.
SMITH I was Chomsky's colleague at MIT for fifteen years, and I honor him greatly, but here mystery seems a more precise word than ignorance. In principle ignorance can be dispelled, whereas mystery cannot be, because in its case every advance that we make opens onto horizons we didn't even know existed. We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery. That is not going to change.
BENEKE Let me ask an impolite question. Religion appears to some people—Freud, for example—as a form of wish fulfillment. Because people want the world to be a certain way, and because it is emotionally satisfying to believe the world is a certain way, people hold certain beliefs about God or life after death. There is evidence that where there are harsh child-rearing practices with a lot of corporal punishment, people conceive of God as very harsh and punitive. What do you make of this?
SMITH I take heart in your child-rearing example. The fact that God has been seen predominately as a loving parent suggests that harsh, punitive, corporal punishment has been the exception rather than the rule. But your question itself I don't take as impolite at all. It introduces an important issue, the appropriateness of psychologizing. Philosophers consider psychologizing a logical fallacy for being