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Forgotten Truth by Huston Smith

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Forgotten Truth by Huston Smith FORGOTTEN TRUT~ ThE CoMMON VisioN of ThE WoRld's REliqioNs HUSTON SMITH =HarperSanFrancisco A Division of HarperCollinsPublishcrs Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the fol­ lowing material: Excerpts on pages 94-95 from Tales of the Deroishes by ldries Shah. Copyright© 1967 by ldries Shah. Reprinted by permission of ldries Shah and the publishers, Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, England, and E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. Excerpts on pages 33 and 145 from "Burnt Norton" and "East Coker" from Four QJLartets by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc Excerpt on pages 43-46 from The Monastery ofjade Mountain by Peter Goullart. Reprinted by permission of John Murray Ltd., London, England. FORGOITEN TRUTH: The Common Vision of the Worlds Religions. Copy­ right© 1976 by Huston Smith. Preface copyright© 1992 by Huston Smith. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner what­ soever without written permission except in the case of brief quota­ tions embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. FIRST HARPERCOLLINS PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Huston Forgotten truth. Includes Index 1. Religion-Philosophy I. Title BL5l.S572 1985 200'.1 ISBN 0-06-250787-7 92-53925 05 RRD H 20 1918 17 16 CoNTENTs Preface v I. The Way Things Are I 2. Symbolism of Space: The Three-Dimensional Cross 19 3. The Levels of Reality 34 4. The Levels of Selfhood 60 5. The Place of Science 96 6. Hope, Yes; Progress, No 118 7. Epilogue 146 Appendix: The Psychedelic Evidence 155 Index 174 For Eleanor Kendra ELEANoR: Variant of Helene (Greek), goddess of light; from helene, "the bright one." KENDRA: Ken. Scottish, to know; to have perception or understanding. Kendra. Sanskrit ~ cognate to the Greek KEVTPOV Center. Modern society is intensely secular; even ·those who regret this admit it. The irony is that, after excluding the mystical tradition from our cultural mainstream and claiming to find it irrelevant to our concerns, so many of us feel empty without it. DAVID MAYBURY·LEWIS, Millennium PREfACE TO ThE 1992 EdiTiON People have a profound need to believe that the truth they perceive is rooted in the unchanging depths of the universe; for were it not, could the truth be really important? Yet how can we so believe when others see truth differently? Archaic peoples, wrapped like cocoons in their tribal beliefs, did not face this dilemma. Even civilizations on the whole have been spared it, for until recently they were largely self-contained. It is we­ we moderns, we worldly wise-who experience the problem acutely. This book addresses that problem. Twenty years before it was published in 1976, I wrote The Worlds Religions (originally titled The Religions of Man), which presented the major traditions in their individuality and variety. It took me two decades to see how they converge. The outlooks of individual men and women (the militant atheist, the pious believer, the cagey skepticY"are too varied to classify, but when they gather in collectivities-the outlooks of tribes, societies, civilizations, and at deepest level the world's enduring religions-a pattern emerges. One finds a remarkable unity underlying the surface differences. When we look at human bodies we normally notice their external fea­ tures, which differ markedly. Meanwhile the spines that support this variety are structurally much alike. It is the same with col­ lective outlooks. Outwardly they too differ, but inwardly it is as if an "invisible geometry" has everywhere been working to shape them to a single truth. v vi I PREFACE The only notable exception is ourselves; our modern Western outlook has differed in its very soul from what might otherwise be called "the human unanimity." But there is an explanation for this, namely, modern science and its misreading. If the cause were science itself, our deviation might be taken as a break­ through: a new departure for humankind, the dawning of a new day after a long night of ignorance and superstition. But since the cause has been a misreading of science, our case is an aber­ ration. If we correct it we can rejoin the human race. The time is ripe for that correction-seeing this is what prompts the new Preface to this book. Our mistake was expect­ ing science to provide us with a world view, when we now see that it shows us only half the world-its physical, calculable, testable, significantly controllable, half. And even that half is now unpicturable; it can't be visualized (see pages 103-109 in the text). So science no longer presents us with a model for even half of the world. For two thousand years, Europeans followed Aristotle in picturing the earth as surrounded by sentient, crys­ talline spheres, a model which modern science displaced with its clockwork universe. Postmodern science gives us not another model of the universe, but no model at all. "Don't ask how na­ ture can be the way it is," Richard Feynman told his students to­ wards the close of his life, "for that question leads down a sink­ hole from which no scientist has emerged alive. Nobody has any idea how nature can be the way it is." So scientific triumphalism, which came close to being mod­ ernity's zeitgeist, is over, for two reasons. One, we realize that powerful as science is in certain domains, there are other do­ mains its empirical method can't track (s-ee pages 14-16 below). Two, the things science can work with no longer converge in a model that makes sense even of nature. This absence of a model for the world is the deepest defini­ tion of postmodernism and the confusion of our times. The two come close to being the Sa)De thing. A recent review of eight books, all carrying the word "postmodern" in their titles, throws in the towel, concl'!ding that no one knows what that word PREFACE I Vll means anymore. That's true if we stay with the pundits, but un­ derlying their definitions is a common denominator that is quite serviceable. Ask yourself if you know what's going on. If your answer is no, you're postmodern. '1\nyone who isn't con· fused today," Simone Weil reports, "simply isn't thinking straight." If people didn't need models of reality and the life-serving orientation and confidence they provide, there would be no problem; but history suggests that we do need them. There have been times when societies were triumphant and became true cultures, when people, through their values and beliefs, knew who they were and were at one with themselves. The Iliad, the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Henry V, and War and Peace celebrate.., such times. Even in bad times there has usually been a con­ sensus of sorts; symbols had accepted meaning and significance, providing bastions where people could rally, console and enter­ tain themselves, and attack agreed-upon evils. But in our post­ modern Western world, as Walker Percy points out, "something has gone wrong, and gone wrong in a sense far more radical than, say, the evils of industrial England which engaged Dickens. It did not take a dia~nostician to locate the evils of the sweat­ shops of the nineteenth-century Midlands. But now it seems that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of meaning itself, the very ways [in which] people see and under­ stand themselves." What is called into question now is the very enterprise of human life. Instead of deploring social evils from a posture of consensus, it is now the consensus itself th<U is called into question. Rebecca West made the point differently while retaining the point itself. Asked to name the mood of this latter twentieth century, she said, "a desperate search for a pattern." That "the human unanimity"-how things pretty much looked to peoples everywhere until modern science threw the West temporarily off-balance-has helpful things to suggest toward the creation of a viable pattern for our time, is this book's basic thesis. It does not argue foolishly that traditional peoples were, or are, universally wise. Their science has been superseded, and viii I PREFAcE modernity blew the whistle on slavery, even as postmodernity is blowing it on racial and gender injustices. But if somewhere hid­ den in the depths of thing~ there are invariants-things that resemble the floor of the ocean over which currents sweep, and waves atop those currents-it doesn't much matter when they are pondered, unless (to switch metaphors) one has been in a tun­ nel so long one has forgotten that sun and stars and rain exist. The premodern realization that they do exist-that things more wonderful than the tunnel vision of modernity allowed are not only real but more real than the ones that pushed them out of sight-is the thesis this essay explores with absolute seriousness. Four additional points deserve note. The first concerns the need for twentieth-century science to posit invisible realities, a need that has gathered momentum since this book first appeared. At the opening of the century, WilliamJames epitomized religion as "belief that there is an un­ seen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously ad­ justing ourselves thereto." In those terms modernity couldn't be wholeheartedly religious, for it looked to science to tell it what existed, and science's silence regarding the unseen rendered distinctive religious objects-God, soul, and the like-suspect.
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