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CHAPTER 1
Huston Smith's Perennial Philosophy
In April 1999, I traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to attend a meeting named, misleadingly, "Science and Consciousness." Held in a hotel modeled after a Mayan pyramid, the five-day conference was actually a New Age bazaar, serving up diverse products for boosting physical, mental, and spiritual energy. The five hundred or so attendees could jump-start their day with Vipassana meditation, tai chi, or a "dance of universal peace." Later they listened to speakers — most of whom hailed from alternative teaching centers such as the California Institute for Integral Studies and the Institute of Noetic Sciences — propound the benefits of Transcendental Meditation, shamanic drumming, and devotional prayer. In speech after speech, mystical experiences were invoked as a panacea that can heal both mind and body.
To the extent that lecturers invoked science, it was generally in the spirit of the New Age classic The Tao of Physics, in which Fritjof Capra proclaimed that modern physics has rediscovered mystical truths embodied in Hinduism and Buddhism. That was the theme of a talk by Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo astronaut whose vision of the earth against the backdrop of space in 1971 convinced him that life was not just an accident but was divinely ordained. Mitchell went on to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which promotes science with a spiritual dimension.
Superstring theory and other esoteric advances in physics, Mitchell assured us in Albuquerque, are revealing that our reality is embedded in a much more expansive, higher-dimensional realm of pure energy — or pure spirit, as Mitchell preferred to think of it. The discovery of quantum nonlocality — the ability of particles to exert subtle influences on each other instantaneously across vast distances — is confirming the ancient mystical teaching that all things are profoundly interconnected. Quantum nonlocality might also explain extrasensory perception, Mitchell added, as well as the miraculous healing that results from prayer and other spiritual practices.
Part of me bridled at these efforts to transform physics into a feel-good religion. I tended to agree with the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg that "as we have discovered more and more fundamental physical principles they seem to have less and less to do with us." At the same time, I sympathized with the sentiments on display in Albuquerque. Speakers and audience members alike exuded an almost palpable yearning for the transcendent, the marvelous, the mystical.
One lecturer, after giving a talk on the links between "quantum biology" and Eastern mysticism, led us in guided meditation. He turned on a tape of tinkling music, set a turquoise-colored vase on a table, and instructed us to "resonate with the vase's emptiness." Afterward, an audience member enthused with a Texas twang that he felt the vase "turn into particles and disappear." "I had that experience too," the lecturer replied, adding that at these moments we are "experiencing God."
Stepping outside the hotel for some fresh air, I found myself in a throng of smokers. I overheard a heavyset, blond-bunned woman telling a friend about an "amazing" experience she had had earlier that day. While relaxing with her eyes closed in the hotel's hot tub, the blond woman recalled, all her boundaries dissolved, and she felt as though she were a fetus floating in a cosmic womb. The friend looked at her with a mixture of skepticism and envy, as did I.
In one of the more scientifically rigorous lectures, the ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna, the younger brother of the psychedelic provocateur Terence, discussed the mind-bending properties of dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. As I took a seat before McKenna's talk, a petite, white-haired woman in a sensible pantsuit asked me if I knew anything about this "DMT substance." I explained that DMT is an extremely powerful hallucinogen, which when smoked or injected in its pure form delivers the equivalent of a ten-hour LSD trip compressed into less than half an hour. I added that a DMT-laced beverage called ayahuasca serves as a sacrament for churches in South America and elsewhere. The grandmotherly woman nodded earnestly and asked, "Is the speaker going to tell us how to obtain it?"
I came to this meeting in part to steep myself in mysticism, New Age style. But a more important goal was meeting Huston Smith, an eighty-year-old religious scholar who had recently retired from the University of California at Berkeley. Smith is a walking, talking embodiment of the perennial philosophy. The seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz coined the phrase philosophia perennis, and it was popularized in the twentieth century by the British author Aldous Huxley (who wrote a book titled The Perennial Philosophy) and others.
The perennial philosophy holds that the world's great spiritual traditions, in spite of their obvious differences, express the same fundamental truth about the nature of reality, a truth that can be directly apprehended during a mystical experience. Implicit in the perennial philosophy is the notion that mystical perceptions transcend time, place, culture, and individual identity. Just as a farmer in first-century China and a Web site designer in twenty-first-century New York City see the same moon when they look skyward, so will they glimpse the same truth in the depths of a mystical vision.
Raised by Methodist missionaries in China, Smith earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1945 and went on to become one of the twentieth century's foremost philosophers of religion. His 1958 book The World's Religions (whose original, pre-feminism title was The Religions of Man) has sold more than two and a half million copies and remains a definitive text of comparative religion. Reading the book, I understood why it has fared so well. Smith's writing style was unusually vivid for a serious religious scholar. He was passionate, witty, and scrupulously honest about his intentions.
Smith admitted in his introduction that he would not dwell on the many sins committed in the name of religion, including "human sacrifice and scapegoating, fanaticism and persecution, the Christian Crusades and the holy wars of Islam." His goal was not to criticize religions but to promote understanding of them by showing them in the best possible light. The book was animated by affection not only for Smith's personal faith, Christianity, but for all "wisdom traditions." Far from downplaying religions' differences, Smith celebrated them. He likened religions to "a stained glass window whose sections divide the light of the world into different colors."
At the end of The World's Religions, Smith addressed the problem that the perennial philosophy seeks to solve. Given the enormous diversity of religious beliefs, how should we choose among them? Smith's response was that of a grandfather confronted with grandchildren demanding to know whom he loves most: I love you all! he replied, so sincerely that everyone can go away happy. Smith justified his response by arguing that all religions agree on three fundamental tenets: First, reality is more unified than it appears. Second, reality is better than it ordinarily seems to us. Third, reality is more mysterious than it looks. These are the central insights of the perennial philosophy, which mystics know firsthand.
An Entheocenic Epiphany
When I started my research for this book, Smith's name kept coming up in my readings and interviews; he was described as an authority on mysticism in both the scholarly and spiritual sense. Smith has not been content to know other wisdom traditions only from the outside. In the mid-1950s he learned yoga and meditation from a Hindu swami. From 1958 to 1973 he practiced Zen meditation, and for the next fifteen years he plunged into Sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam. In the late 1980s he befriended members of the Native American Church and participated in their ceremonies. After one of his daughters married a Jew and converted to Judaism, Smith steeped himself in that faith.
Smith's writings so impressed the journalist Bill Moyers that he produced a five-part series of interviews with Smith, broadcast in 1996 as The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith. The more I heard about Smith, the more he seemed the ideal person to help me get my bearings as I ventured into the deeps of mysticism. It was thus with great anticipation that I arrived at the "Science and Consciousness" conference in Albuquerque, just in time to hear Smith's lecture.
To my immense disappointment, I was turned away at the door of the ballroom; there was not even standing room. I lurked by the entrance like a groupie waiting for Smith to emerge. When he finally appeared, he was mobbed by admirers. A tall man, he loomed above most of those around him. His outfit was vaguely Asian, vaguely clerical: white pants, white collarless shirt, and a woven vest. Smith had snowy hair, a close-cropped beard, and a bearing both gentle and regal. He wore a hearing aid in each ear, and he had a slight stoop, perhaps the result of his habit of leaning intently toward anyone speaking to him.
Smith listened and responded patiently to each person as I stood, increasingly exasperated, outside the throng. During a lull in the discussion I thrust my hand at Smith, introduced myself, and asked if he had time for an interview. To my delight, he suggested that we meet for dinner in his room. As we sat down that evening before our room-service meals, Smith paused for grace. "As they say in the Zen monastery, Itadakimasu, which is the world's shortest blessing and therefore my favorite. All it means is 'I eat.'" Cutting into his lamb, Smith recalled that his old friend Joseph Campbell, when asked what his "yoga" was, had mentioned three things: rare roast beef, good Irish whiskey, and forty-four laps in the pool every day.
Smith spoke in slow, measured tones. His voice, in spite of an occasional quaver, was strong and resonant, and he laughed frequently. He seemed to derive sensual pleasure from words — particularly exotic ones, such as congeries — savoring them syllable by syllable. Smith exuded intelligence, humor, and generosity of spirit — all the traits that one looks for in a sage — but he could be sharp-tongued, too. He even had a few harsh words for the world's religions, or "wisdom traditions."
"I'm the first to insist that not everything about them is wise," he said. The wisdom traditions have in the past legitimized caste divisions, slavery, and the subjugation of women; the religious leadership in the United States, "particularly in the dominant religion, Christianity, is third rate." Many young people turn away from religion, Smith lamented, because it is presented to them in the worst possible way. "What came through to them were two things: dogmatism, 'We've got the truth, everybody else is going to hell'; and moralism, 'Don't do this, that, and especially not the other thing.'" Smith's missionary parents had imparted very different religious precepts to him: "First, we're in good hands. And second, in gratitude for that, it would be well if we bore one another's burden." After a lifetime of studying many religions, Smith had found no better formula.
Religious institutions are in some sense a necessary evil, Smith said. "If you do not institutionalize your spirituality, it gets no traction on history. So if Jesus had not been followed by Saint Paul, who established a church, the Sermon on the Mount would have evaporated within a generation. So I think if we are serious about the spiritual life, we have to undertake the burdens of institutionalization — and they are heavy."
Religions, Smith asserted, serve as our major repository of the perennial philosophy. They all agree that beyond this mundane, material world is a transcendent realm; although we can in rare moments glimpse this reality, it is as distant from our descriptions of it as a finger pointing skyward is distant from the moon. "The fact that they came to that view independently," Smith continued, "in India, China, and East Asia, and the Abra-hamic traditions, lends a certain, in my mind, a priori or prima facie sense that it might be right — at least in fitting the human makeup."
When I asked Smith about his own mystical experiences, he chose his words with extra care, for reasons that soon became apparent. "I'm pretty flat-footed as a mystic," he said. "I'm not good at moving into a distinctly different state of consciousness." Smith had been meditating for almost half a century, and he still meditated almost every day. But his meditative experiences were "pretty ordinary, garden variety."
His most important mystical experiences, Smith told me, were "entheogenic." The word literally means "God-containing" and was popularized in the 1980s by Gordon Wasson, a banker turned mushroom expert, as a term for plants or chemicals that induce spiritual experiences. Smith prefers the term entheogenic to hallucinogenic, which he considers derogatory and inaccurate, and to psychedelic, which is too closely associated with the 1960s and recreational drug use.
Smith has been cautious about divulging his entheogenic encounters. Fearing misunderstanding, he did not mention them in his broadcast conversations with Bill Moyers. Smith emphasized to me that mind-expanding substances can be dangerous and should be used with great care and reverence. Entheogens alone do not constitute a spiritual path. They can at best yield glimpses of the transcendent realm; they cannot deliver you to that realm permanently. They may also encourage an unhealthy obsession with altered states, Smith said, when the goal of spirituality should be the transformation of one's whole life.
Smith took entheogens in the early 1960s, when he was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he stopped after they were outlawed in 1966. He has ingested mind-expanding compounds during only one period since then, in the early 1990s, when he participated in four legal peyote ceremonies of the Native American Church. Smith has no desire to take entheogens again. "I'd had the message," he said, "and I felt no wish to go back."
But Smith clearly cherishes his entheogenic experiences. His first took place on New Year's Day, 1961, in Newton, Massachusetts, at the home of Timothy Leary, then a Harvard psychology professor just beginning to investigate psychedelics. Leary gave Smith two capsules of mescaline. A few hours later Smith felt he was witnessing the reality described in the ancient Hindu Vedas and other mystical texts. He was seeing through the mundane reality around him to the ground of being, the clear light of the void underlying all things.
"From the soles of my feet on," he recalled, "I found myself saying, 'Yes! Yes!'" The experience was not entirely pleasant; Smith once described it as "strange, weird, uncanny, significant, and terrifying beyond belief." Toward the end of the trip, Smith approached Leary and said, "I hope you know what you're playing around with here ... There is such a thing as people being frightened to death."
Mysticism Versus Scientism
One distinguishing characteristic of Smith's spiritual philosophy is his view of enlightenment. He defines enlightenment as "a quality of life" rather than a state of mind; it entails not altered states but altered traits. To Smith, mature mystical knowledge must manifest itself throughout one's life. "If you think you are advancing toward unity with God or the absolute," he said, "and are not growing in love and charity toward your fellow person, you're just deluding yourself." Smith would be "profoundly suspicious" of anyone who claimed to be enlightened but did not exhibit these basic human virtues.
In fact, Smith sees enlightenment as "an ideal" that can be approached but never fully attained by any mortal. After he voiced this opinion in his televised dialogue with Bill Moyers, Smith received letters proclaiming the enlightenment of various spiritual masters, such as the American guru Da Free John and the Indian swami Sai Baba. Smith remained unmoved. "Even Christ said, 'Why callest thou me good?'" he explained to me. "Does anybody presume to top that?" Smith shook his head. "Just in principle, I don't think it's possible," he said. "The mortal coils are too tight."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Rational Mysticism"
by .
Copyright © 2003 John Horgan.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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