Huston Smith, Wise Elder
by Mary Davis (with selections from The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life
by Phil Cousineau)

They first discuss the impact of September 11, whether religion really had anything to do with the attack, and the fact that crimes have been committed both by groups and nations in the name of religion and by groups and countries that are avowedly atheistic. Their conversation continues, touching on life, art, modern culture, myth, religions, and the nature of reality itself.

Huston Smith, on pages 260 to 263 says,"…Religion is important because it is the standard-bearer for this incalculably important idea that we human beings are not at the top of the hierarchy of intelligence in the total scheme of things. Heaven help us if we are. Religion insists that there is a reality that is wiser, more powerful, more compassionate, and more mysterious than we can possibly imagine. I think it is right in this claim, and that is why — again, on balance — I'm for it.

"Let me for a moment, put on my historian of religions cap and give you a quick 'Cook's Tour" of what the great wisdom traditions, as I have come to think of them, say on this point. In East Asia, there was heaven and earth. Earth is this physical universe, and heaven is what transcends it, and, as Confucius said, "Only heaven is great." In South Asia we have samsara (repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death), again, this everyday world, and we have nirvana. I mean, what a signal that this is not all — there is something more to aspire to. And of course, in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam there is this physical universe, its creator, Yahweh, God and Allah.

"The opposite of all this is materialism. Just last week I came upon an aphorism that states the contrast tellingly: "Materialism is a belief that is starving for ideas." The point of this assertion is subtle, but if you spell it out logically, materialism reduces ideas to their physical underpinnings — neuron firings. In technical parlance, an idea is an epiphenomenon — something that derives from what is less than it is, which makes them significant in the nature of things. They're like foam on the beer, unimportant compared with the beer itself, metaphor for the physical universe. Materialism is a deflating move. If we follow it to its logical end, there is no alternative to spiraling into cynicism and despair."

Cousineau: "Is it possible that that downward spiral can be described or imagined as the modern version of Plato's Cave? That we are where we are today because we are trapped in the world of scientific materialism. Or we've become convinced — or been hypnotized into believing — that the shadows on the wall are all there is? And if so, do you think Plato's allegory is still relevant today?"

Smith: "Absolutely. When I was conducting the Cook's Tour, I was going across the vast Eurasian continent, where civilizations originated, and I included their philosophies along with their religions because in traditional cultures, there is little difference between the two. But in the West, they've become bifurcated. I am so glad that you referred to Plato's cave because that allegory has been one of the two foundations of Western civilization, the other being the account of Moses on Mount Sinai. Both of them involve an epiphany, an incursion, of something greater than the mundane into history.

"The outline of Plato's allegory is very simple, which belies its profundity. Plato asks us to imagine prisoners chained inside a cave in such a way that they can only face the wall, and that's the way their whole lives have been lived. All they have seen are the wall and the shadows, but behind them are puppeteers who parade puppets and different objects, and the sun outside the mouth of the cave throws the shadows of the puppets on the wall. All of this leaves the prisoners thinking the entire world is black and white and two-dimensional.

"Plato then says, what would happen if one of those prisoners — just imagine with me — if one of those prisoners were to be unchained and turned around and led toward the opening of the cave? What does he see?

"First, he sees not just black and white, but Technicolor™. Hey, there's color, color in this world! And not just shadows, but light! Light? What's that? Then he goes out into the enchanted garden of the world, and he understands that this light is coming from a source — the sun that fills the world with light."

'Would he not be astonished?' Plato asks.

"Fair question, I would say. But now suppose he is led back, and he wants above all to share this world with his fellow prisoners. 'This isn't it at all,' he says to them. 'It's out there!'

"Plato winds down the story by asking, What would they think? They would think he was crazy, and if he persisted in his opinions they would kill him. Plato was not imagining this because that's exactly what they did to Socrates, who was his teacher, and had opened his eyes to realities greater than those of the mundane world. If I may, I would like to move to the present and add an anecdote to this.

"This came my way this last spring. One of the great gratifications of a long teaching career is the many lasting friendships with students that can develop, and this concerns an MIT student who was passing through Berkeley and told me something that I had never known about himself. He told me his story of the allegory of Plato's cave, which took place back when he was a kid of about fourteen, in the Bronx, and as he put it didn't know beans. One afternoon he was in Manhattan, and passing its public library, and decided to step in. He walked inside and was amazed how many books there were in the world. All these stacks. He wandered down one, and his eye fell on the Dialogues of Plato. Plato? Who's he? Something prompted him to reach for the book and he took it to a reading table, where the book fell open to the Seventh Book of the Republic, which begins with the Allegory of the Cave.

"He found himself reading the story, and when he came to the end of it where Socrates asks, 'Would not someone who had seen the outdoors and gone back into the cave - would that person not realize that the basic point of education is not to communicate facts and figures, but to open student's eyes to vaster worlds they hadn't known existed?'

"When he came to that rhetorical conclusion of the Allegory, my student said he found that tears were streaming from his eyes. He said, 'You know Huston, this was evidence of the longing inside me that there be something more than the streets of New York and the skyscrapers. Something more than that.'"

Cousineau: "That's a beautiful story, Huston, a remarkable example of the timeless aspect of great myths. It doesn't matter when they were written or compiled; when we find them it's as though they were recently written just for us. If it's true that it is the function of religion and philosophy and art to help us turn our eyes from the shadows on the wall to the true light, the divine light of the sun, then what is the contribution that Native American religion has made toward showing us a glint of that holy light? Are they showing us something of that original source? You might remember our friend Gary Rhine asking, 'With all our centuries of history and accumulated knowledge, what is left for Indian people to tell us?' Is there something about turning toward the light that American Indians can still teach us?"

Smith: "Not having been taken in by modernity's reductionism, Native Americans survive as a living witness to the transcendent that is hidden in the ancestral memory of the rest of us. When I say ancestral, I have in mind this Turtle Island that is America's geographical ancestor. Let me put it this way. Earlier I was talking about materialism as a philosophy that is starving for ideas. Native Americans were never materialists. It would have seemed crazy, crazy to them. For them, the Great Spirit has always been the ultimate.

"The Winnebago medicine man Reuben Snake was my preeminent teacher from the Native Americans. I recall one of the things he taught me. He told me, 'Huston, our teepees pointed east, and when we stepped out of them in the morning we would throw up our arms and shout "Aho!"' I did it this morning. The first time I see the sun it infuses me with this inspiration, just like the sunlight brings the vegetation and the beauty and all life.

"I also remember what the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi once said: 'Knoweth thou not that the sun that thou seeth with thine eyes is but a reflection of the sun behind the veil.' So even the sun is only a symbol and a metaphor for a deeper transcendent invisible source from which even it springs, and it relays to us the glories of that source."

There is much more of interest and value in this interview and in this book. Because of our space limitations, we'll quote just one more exchange from pages 265 - 268, when they discuss "the way things are!"

Cousineau: "For a long time now, I have been strangely moved by the way you have phrased the question you seem to feel is of the utmost importance to ask of ourselves: 'Is there anything more important than the way things really are?' Is there?"

Smith: "I don't think so."

Cousineau: "Of course, it's possible to know how things may be for us, but is it possible to know in a definitive way how things really are?"

Smith: "Yes. Psychiatrists, therapists, counselors have come out on this subject. One of the greatest has said it very succinctly, that from the innumerable hours spent talking with disturbed people, it comes to view that deeper than the craving for possession, deeper than the outreach for sexual satisfaction, there is an even more fundamental craving in the human makeup. It is the craving for right orientation.

"I mean these people are confused. They don't know which way to go. They don't know what to do. They have the need for the sense that says, 'Yes, I am on the right track.' Now, this calls for a sense of the lay of the land. How can you be oriented if you do not know the territory? And that's where the way things are kicks in to give us what we need."

Cousineau: "And yet, we live in a postmodernist time in which the Zeitgeist tells us that everything is relative, so that it is almost impossible to see through the scrim of things to this ultimate reality, as you might say. Isn't it the task of 'seers' to see through the illusions of the times? So what would you suggest that people do to help them see through the mistakes of our times?"

Smith: "Take a closer look at the history of the modern world that ushered in our mistakes. At the tail end of the Middle Ages, Europe had stagnated, thinking that its outlook was close to the way things actually are. The Renaissance helped to get people out of that rut, which was good, but then the Enlightenment took over and overrated the powers of reason. It thought that reason, working hand-in-glove with technology, was opening the gates to unending progress. Postmodernism smashed that idea, but it has come up with nothing constructive to replace it with, and as Alfred North Whitehead put the point vividly, if man cannot live by bread alone, still less can he live by disinfectants. Without something we truly believe in we are left with relativism, and relativism is an unlivable philosophy that is in constant danger of spiraling into cynicism and despair. Moreover, absolute relativism isn't even a coherent outlook, for in turning relativism into an absolute it has an internal contradiction built into it.

"There's another way to come at this issue. Deconstructionism is almost a synonym for postmodernism, and some things do need to be torn down — demolition squads have their uses. But to set out to deconstruct everything? — which (as far as one can make out from its unreadable prose) is what postmodernism seems to be bent on accomplishing. At minimum, postmodernists are out to tear down the Great Traditions of the great civilizations, beginning with that of the West. We need to remember that it's a lot harder to create than to destroy. It can take months to make a beautiful vase, but it can be smashed in an instant.

"Now to the other part of your question. How have I been able to escape this postmodern malaise? Well, I was lucky. It's public knowledge that I was born to missionaries, in China, and while their outlook was parochial in many ways, what came through to me through my parents wasn't dogmatism — we've got the truth and everybody else is going to hell, or moralisms like don't do this, that, and the other thing. What really came through to me was this: We're in good hands and in gratitude for that fact it would be good if we bore one another's burdens. With all my gallivanting around the world, I have yet to come upon a simple formula that surpasses that one, and it shielded me from relativism. Later, I came to realize that my own tradition, Protestant Christianity, was not the only one, and I caught glimpses of the treasures — 'in them thar hills' — as prospectors for gold used to say. Following up on those leads opened the world's traditions to me, so, as I say, I've been very fortunate.

"When I started looking around I was amazed. The first foreign tradition that came to me was the Vedanta, the philosophic branch of Hinduism. In a way I won't go into here, I didn't so much seek it out as that it came my way. And when it did that it felt like a huge tidal wave of truth was breaking over me. It took me about a decade to get on top of Vedanta, and then the tidal waves of other traditions scrambled me in much the same way.

"What kept me going was the marvelous, marvelous truths that kept coming my way. On my own I could never have gotten to come upon them. Having then practiced Zen Buddhism with Daisetz Suzuki and the 'Dharma Bums,' what struck me most was the sublime unanimity behind all of these traditions. Independently, they all came to the same basic conclusions as to the way things are. The great reward of my career has been the opportunity it has given me to delve more deeply into these traditions which surfaced in this sublime unanimity."

(These selections from The Way Things Are are copyrighted material and reproduced here with written permission. This material may be reproduced only with written permission.)

Read a review of
The Way Things Are by Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph. D.

Read more by Phil Cousineau at his website

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