HUSTON SMITH ON TERRORISM: AN INTERVIEW WITH KAISA PUHAKKA

Kaisa Puhakka, Ph.D. 80 N. Cabrillo Highway, PMB Q-111, Half Moon Bay, CA 94019

ABSTRACT: On two occasions, in May and June 2002, I (KP) interviewed Huston Smith (HS) at his home in Berkeley, CA on the topic of terrorism. My initial hesitations about engaging him in a topic that speaks to the dark side of the human spirit were quickly dispelled, as his deep concern and passion about this topic were evident from the outset. In the following conversation, he makes a powerful case for understanding the fundamental cause of the conflicts and divisions among people around the world that have intensified with technological advances and globalization of economies in recent decades. He also examines the role that religion plays in the larger historical and cultural context of present day conflicts. He challenges us all to recognize how very important it is to think deeply and clearly, and with courage, about this topic.

KP: Thank you, Huston, for agreeing to share your thoughts and reflections on terrorism.

HS: Well, it is important, very important that we not engage in denial, as psychologists would say, and turn our faces away from it. So, it is good that we are doing this.

KP: I appreciate what you are saying. I must confess that I found this interview to be quite a challenging assignment. After all, Huston Smith has spoken and written so eloquently about what is best in all religions. Terrorism, however, is as far removed from what is best in religion as anything can be.

HS: Well, I am very glad that you rose to the occasion. You are right. I have tried to point out to our secular age of widespread disbelief the values that I think we are missing out on, and also to redress the negative image that the media, by and large, leaves us with about the affairs of humanity.

KP: Yes, the news coverage tends to focus on where the dramatic action is— disasters and violence.

HP: I don’t want to fault them exclusively. Actually, we all share the blame because we are addicts to violence. That means that we like to read about it. We also shudder and are in shock. Nevertheless, if we see violence our attention goes there, and so that is what sells newspapers and raises the audience ratings on television and news programs. To give a concrete illustration, if a pro-life advocate shoots an abortionist

Email: [email protected] We thank both Huston Smith and Kaisa Puhakka for their time and good energy spent in this meaningful dialogue, designed for the express purpose of sharing with JTP readers. Copyright Ó 2002 Transpersonal Institute

The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2002, Vol. 34, No. 1 1 lawyer, it will be on the front page of every newspaper in the nation and maybe in the world. Meanwhile, on that day, millions of people may have reached down into their inner life and into their spiritual practices, trying to throw the switches that make the difference between courage and despair; but those go unnoticed by the media.

When the World Trade Towers fell, our world changed forever. When something like this happens, it is time to put the pleasant things aside—not to forget about the good in them but just set it aside for the moment—and to confront evil. Both sides are involved, and we will talk about that, but it is of the utmost importance to think clearly and deeply. So, again, I am just very glad that the Journal is taking on this topic.

KP: Terrorism seems to have taken over our national consciousness. We are obsessed with it. Let’s begin by defining the word. How do you define it?

HS: Abstractly it simply refers to acts that spread terror in people’s hearts, but in the political climate that has followed the toppling of the Trade Towers and gouging of the Pentagon it has become reified, which is to say, we have turned it into a kind of ‘‘thing.’’ Specifically, in the American mind it has come to signify horrendous, unjustifiable ‘‘things’’ that our enemies do. Thus 9–11 was a terrorist act—which it truly was—as were Saddam Hussein’s acts of using chemical weapons against his own Kurdish people in 1988. But we don’t class the over one hundred military acts the has inflicted on the world since WWII as terrorist, for those we consider to have been justified, which is to say in our national interests. During the month or so that we were bombing Afghanistan, thousands of Afghanis must have been living in terror, but it’s probably impossible for a nation to think of itself as terrorist. If they did they would change their ways.

One of the dangers in defining terrorism in this way—to repeat, as monstrous acts perpetrated by our enemies—is that it gives our government a blank check to do anything it wants to do in the name of checking terrorism. The chief victim here is the hard won civil liberties that have been one of our nation’s most envied showpieces. Soon after 9–11 Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor warned the nation that we would experience more restrictions on our personal freedom than has ever been the case, and those restrictions have transpired. With swift, successive strokes of the Supreme Court and executive pen, our freedoms have already been seriously compromised, and more restrictions are likely to follow. All our rulers need do is say that they are acting to protect us from terrorists and in knee-jerk response we let them do anything they want to.

KP: What causes terrorism?

HS: Anger. Hatred that can escalate into fury. Humiliation, arising in good part from a feeling of impotence. And despair.

KP: I want you to elaborate on those four causes, but first—and right here—I want to ask why you don’t include religion in that list when most Americans tie terrorism

2 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2002, Vol. 34, No. 1 quite tightly to . Are they right in making that splice? More broadly, does religion bear on the terrorist issue?

HS: Good point. You are of course right in implying that it is in the picture. Religion bears importantly on terrorism, but I don’t think we see clearly how it figures. The relationship is complicated, so I hope you will excuse me if I make this what will probably be my longest answer to your questions. I want to take it in two steps.

First, in conflict situations religion provides both sides with their respective identities. In the Islamic world that identity is openly religious for Islam is by definition a religion. On our side the separation of church and state makes the matter more complicated. It debars us from characterizing ourselves as a religious nation, but Paul Tillich has been useful here. He dug below the usual trappings of religion (doctrines, creeds, rituals, and the like) to define it as ‘‘ultimate concern:’’ religion is what concerns us ultimately. By this existential definition we are a religious nation, our religion being (de facto if not de jure) the American way of life and our own well-being. So religion enters at this basic level by providing both parties with their respective identities.

The next step is the tricky one, the place where commentators most often go wrong. These different identities provide, as philosophers say, the necessary condition for conflict, but not the sufficient condition. A fight requires at least two people, but being two doesn’t require that they fight; they could just as well use their twoness to be friends. This simple point, too often overlooked by the media, as I say—gives the lie to the charge that religion causes conflicts when in fact its typical role is to provide belligerents with their respective identities.

KP: That’s helpful, but if it’s not religion, generically speaking, that causes conflicts, and in the present instance terrorism, we are back with the four interlocking causes you cited before I interrupted you. Can you say more about them?

HS: I will, but not before pointing out that underlying the four is the foundational cause of all conflicts, and that is human nature, or more precisely its egocentric propensities. We humans are richly endowed with capacities for virtue, but self- centeredness is the shadow side of our character. It may be needed for biological, Darwinian survival, but be that as it may, it is the underlying cause of all our woes. Christians attribute this flaw in our nature to the fall, Jews to sin, Muslims to ghaflah (forgetfulness of who we essentially are) Hindus to avidya (ignorance of who we really are), Buddhists to tanha or grasping. But by whatsoever name, this tendency to put ourselves first, before others, is the root cause of all conflict. When we group together in families, communities and nation states, self interest compounds rapidly, for here it is reinforced by a virtue—fellow feeling. If we don’t put our group’s interests ahead of other groups, we will be letting our companions down.

KP: What you are saying sounds right, but it’s also quite abstract. How does all this connect with terrorism?

HS: Good. Having disposed with the misconception that religion is the direct cause of

Huston Smith on terrorism 3 terrorism, as I hope I have, I can now say what the direct cause is, and the answer is: The bad things terrorists think the parties they attack have done to them. More strongly, it is the feeling of past atrocities unavenged. An anecdote can help to drive this point home.

When Bosnia was the locus of terrorism I happened to pick up a news clip in which a reporter was interviewing a woman in a Serbian village. The dialogue went like this: Are there any Muslims in your village? No. What would you do if there were? We would tell him to leave. And if he didn’t? We would shoot him. Why? Because that’s what they did to us four hundred years ago.

There you have it. Neither side in that conflict cared a hoot about the religious beliefs of their enemies, which is why it wouldn’t have been accurate to call it a religious war. The cause was a clash of self-interests, in which revenge figured prominently. Comparably with the toppling of the Trade Towers: The terrorists didn’t care about our religion or lack thereof. They acted out of the sense of injustices Muslims feel they have suffered by the modern West as captained now by the United States.

KP: Does globalization play a role in the increasing tensions between many of the Muslim countries and the Western countries, particularly the U.S.?

HS: Globalization of the economy is a fact, and a trend in the world that is unlikely to be reversed unless the very worst of disasters push us back to the Stone Age. At present, wealth—and the power that goes with wealth—is flowing from the poorer countries to the richer countries, and the poorer countries are in danger of collapsing because of forces beyond their control. If the U.S. gets an economic sniffle, the developing countries get pneumonia. The causes of terrorism are complicated, but the growing disparity between the wealth and power among nations—especially when coupled with widespread unemployment for young men and an increasing scarcity of resources—is fertile ground for terrorism. In a review of a book on globalization, Joseph E. Stiglitz writes, ‘‘The total value of the benefits that the U.S. gets out of the current system exceeds, by a considerable amount, the total foreign aid the U.S. gives. What a peculiar world, in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest country, which happens, at the same time, to be among the stingiest in giving assistance in the world.’’ Although some special interests benefit from this situation, it does not benefit us as a nation and exacerbates all the other problems on this planet.

KP: Are the Muslims right in feeling that they have been victimized?

HS: That gets us into politics where everybody has their opinions. I speak with no authority here, but of course I have my opinions too, and since you asked, I do believe that Islam has not gotten a fair shake in the modern world. In the 16th–17th centuries it made a great mistake in not foreseeing the power of the controlled experiment (which is at the heart of modern science) to unlock the laws of nature, and that mistake doomed it to lose control over its destiny. Along with other nations it became a sitting duck for colonization, and the colonial powers divided the dar al- islam, the House of Islam, among themselves, turning it into nations under their

4 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2002, Vol. 34, No. 1 control—lines on the map that bore little resemblance to tribal and linguistic identities. We think of colonialism as having collapsed with WWII, and so it did with the exception of Palestine, which Muslims regard as the last remaining outpost of colonialism on our planet. Nominally it is Israel’s colony, but Muslims see it as equally the United State’s colony, for without the five billion dollars a year we give it Israel couldn’t maintain its unilateral control. And that’s only the obvious case, of United State colonizing; Muslims say, the political case. Economically, they see us as colonizing the entire Middle East by backing if not installing governments— many of them dictatorial and corrupt—that are more beholden to us than they are to their own people. (To put one of FDR’s quips in their mouths, they hear us admitting, ‘‘Sure those dictators are bastards, but they’re our bastards.’’) Muslims say we preach democracy, but our functioning priorities are a pipeline to their oil and allies that will protect that lifeline for our prosperity. Arafat never made it from a guerilla warrior to a statesman and can rightly be called a terrorist, but he is the only democratically elected leader in the Middle East.

Kaisa, I feel the need to interrupt myself here to ask you to please hear me out. I am not going to conclude by saying terrorism and the fury that backs it is entirely our fault. It takes two to tango, and Islam has a great deal to answer for in this conflict. I’ll come to that, but the first step in conflict resolution—which I take it is everybody’s final objective here—is to acknowledge one’s own piece of the action. So I want to complete my account of what Muslims see us contributing to the present conflict before turning to what I see their input as being.

KP: Please continue.

HS: You will recall that my list of the direct causes of terrorism ended with impotence, humiliation, and despair. In the 15th century Islam, (possibly rivaled by China) was the ornament of civilization in both power and culture. Since then it has been downhill all the way, not only in military power, but also in political fragmentation, economic decline, and education. Militarily the tide turned against the Muslims in the successive defeats the Ottoman Empire suffered in the 17th century. Economically it has had to watch countries like South Korea and Taiwan soar past it, while in education it is close to the bottom of the heap. Post-colonial China has gotten its act together, as have India and Pakistan more or less, but Middle Eastern Islamic countries are on their knees. How much is their fault and how much derives from conditions the West has imposed on them is debatable—highly debatable–but the fact is that at this point they feel impotent and are feeling the despair that impotence occasions. So, seeing nothing they can do to turn their situation around, they lash out in fury. Sampson, chained to the pillars of the temple, pulled the temple down–the act of a ‘‘suicide terrorist,’’ one might say. It was more meaningful to assert himself, even if it brought on his own death, than to submit helplessly to the humiliation of being chained.

KP: That’s heavy. What you just said gives insight into the minds of the con- temporary ‘‘suicide bombers’’ as well. Can we move now to their piece in the action? Have they contributed to bringing on the condition in which they find themselves?

Huston Smith on terrorism 5 HS: They certainly have. Middle Eastern Islam, which is what we are mainly talking about, is having great difficult moving into the modern world. By the modern world here, I mean a multicultural world with the ‘‘live and let live’’ attitude this requires of peoples today. My father became a missionary to China in answer to the call of the Student Christian movement in the early 20th century to ‘‘Christianize the world in this generation,’’ but Christian triumphalism collapsed well before mid-century— as it should have, most Christians would add. But fundamentalist Muslims, fueled by the memory of Islam’s past glory, live in the hope of an eventual Islamicized world. This sets off a chain of mistakes. Since they see no way of effecting Islamic triumphalism, they look to Allah to do the job. And the condition of his doing it is (according to this warped logic) that his people conform to his commands as revealed in the Koran. This sets the stage for mulla take-over, mullas being the lawyers of Islam whose vocation is to interpret the legal stipulations of the Koran. And right here lies the biggest internal problem in Islam today, one that they are going to have to work out themselves. In Middle Eastern Islam 80% of the people who are traditionally minded are ruled by the 20% who have been educated in the West and are westernized in their thinking. This is an explosive situation.

KP: Are the 80% fundamentalists?

HS: To varying degrees, but basically yes, and what fuels , Islamic and Christian, is the feeling of being threatened. (What the two feel threatened by differs, but the underlying sense of threat is common to both, and is shared by Jewish fundamentalists as well.) Islamic fundamentalists see their whole way of life as threatened by modernity. To some extent we can appreciate their alarm, for we too worry about many aspects of modernity—its consumerism, TV violence, flagrant pornography and sexual license generally, the erosion of the family, and (some of us would add) excessive secularism, to close this very short list. But other aspects of fundamentalist Islam will have to go, its subjugation of women and denial of free speech being the leading examples. If we widen the screen to include Middle East Muslims as a whole, not just its fundamentalists, a very important thing they can do is to move beyond the blame game and buckle down to things they can do to better their lot, for it is far from the case that they are completely impotent. Bettering the lot of women, improving education, and permitting free communication are the most obvious things they can do, for it’s silly to blame the West for the abysmal state of their economy (the G.D.P. of Spain is greater than that of all 22 Arab states combined) when half the population is kept out of the work force, illiteracy is rampant, and citizens are not allowed to exchange ideas. The problem is not poverty of natural resources, but poverty of capabilities and opportunities. The two hopeful factors here are, first that Muslim intellectuals recognize these facts of life and are beginning to speak out on them; and second, nothing in the Koran stands in the way of these reforms. The barriers are ingrained local customs and the mulla’s determination to hold onto their power. The wave of democracy that transformed most of South America and East Asia in the 1980s has barely reached the Arab world, and Israel, which undeniably has been a cause, is also being used as an excuse.

KP: Getting back to terrorism, is Islam inherently a violent religion?

6 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2002, Vol. 34, No. 1 HS: I’m going to say, categorically, no. For fourteen centuries the West has been laboring under a distorted image of Islam. That’s understandable, for in that long history the two have shared common borders, which sets the stage for border disputes which can give rise to raids and counter raids that can escalate into all out war. Enemies never have the fairest views of each other, and that has certainly been the case here. To get to the point, Islam has certainly been militant at times, and militant language peppers the Koran in places, but the same can be said of Christianity and the Bible. What shakes out here can be put in a generalization, an historical example, and an exegetical point.

First, the generalization. Norman Daniels, whose Islam and the West: The Making of an Image is the most serious attempt that has been made to compare the use of force in Christianity and Islam, concludes that what can be safely said is that Islam has resorted to force no more than has Christianity, while adding that that is probably an understatement.

Next, the historical example. Spain and Anatolia changed hands at about the same time, in the 15th century. Every Muslim and Jew in Spain was killed, exiled or forced to convert to Christianity, whereas the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church remains in Constantinople (renamed Istanbul) to this day.

As for exegesis, Allah’s compassion and mercy are cited 192 times in the Koran as compared with 17 references to his wrath and vengeance. Of course it is in the nature of politicians to use religion for their own ends, and terrorists are scraping the barrel to find things in Islam that might be interpreted to justify their doings.

KP: Let’s come back to what went wrong. You have spoken to what went wrong in the Islamic world beginning in about the 17th century. What about us? Has the modern West made mistakes other than the one you have already spoken of—using our scientific and technological superiority to exploit Asia to our own advantage?

HS: Yes. The sins of colonialism we now see and confess to, and we are beginning to see warning signs that I have already alluded to: our obsession with money, consumerism generally, the erosion of the family, and TV addiction, both generally and in the way it focuses on violence and sports. But there is one other matter that intellectuals and the media barons are largely blind to, though fortunately it is one that readers of the JTP are schooled to appreciate.

If Islam’s mistake was to underestimate the technological resources of modern science, our mistake has been to overestimate its resources for providing a worldview. It can’t do this because the scientific method is empirical and can deal only with extrapolations from our physical senses. That being the case, values, meanings, purposes, qualities, invisibles, and beings superior to ourselves—in short, the things that figure most prominently in the lives we directly live—slip through the nets of science like the sea slips through the nets of fishermen. (To be strictly accurate, four of the six items in that list would have to be qualified slightly, but for present purposes it stands.) It has been the burden of my life’s work, summarized in my latest book, Why Religion Matters, that this keeps us from standing on tiptoe, so

Huston Smith on terrorism 7 to speak, to access the highest registers that are open to human life— and the conviction that Reality is on our side. This is one mistake traditional societies did not and do not fall into, and one that the Islamic world is right in fearing may be the price of modernizing if it doesn’t manage the transition better than we have.

KP: Turning our attention back to the West, most of the readers of this interview will be psychologists, lay if not professional. Does psychology have any resources for helping us to understand and cope with terrorism?

HS: To some extent I think it does. First, it understands how much our feelings are controlled by denial, the refusal to acknowledge painful facts and feelings. When 9–ll occurred, I thought that one good that might come out of it would be that it punctured forever the myth of progress that has dominated the modern world— progress through never-ending technological advances. A year later I’m not at all sure that that point has gotten through to us. Projection is another psychological mechanism readers of this journal are well schooled in—projecting our sins onto others. Denial and projection work hand in glove in our response to terrorism. We have talked about this, the way we deny all responsibility for it and lay the entire blame on terrorists and their backers. Further, psychologists’ clinical experience helps them to see how much fear underlies other emotions, especially depression and anger. Justifiably, we are incensed about the destruction of the Trade Towers, but that anger is probably augmented by fear—we have so much to lose. Finally, psychologists are in a position to understand the dynamics of mass psychology. Belligerents invariably demonize their enemies while seeing themselves as the soul of virtue. During the Cold War communist countries were the evil empire. Now the Muslims are the evil axis. Nothing has changed.

KP: What about transpersonal psychology? Does it have anything to contribute here?

HS: Because as a nation we are quite literate psychologically, the insights I listed in my preceding answer are pretty much public knowledge, but when we turn to transpersonal psychology that is not at all the case. I go back to the limited worldview the modern world is living in. Correct me if I am wrong, but as I see it, what distinguishes transpersonal from mainline and even humanist/existentialist psychology is its openness to the world’s wisdom traditions—its recognition that they understood things about the mind and human dynamics that we in the West (whose mainline psychology continues to stonewall even Carl Jung, in part because of his respect for India) can learn from.

David Loy, who is no stranger to readers of this journal, has spoken incisively to this issue in an article in a recent issue of the Eastern Buddhist. He refers only to Buddhist teachings that can help us understand 9–11, but most of those teaching have parallels in the other enduring religions. His points are worth itemizing.

First, every death in the tragedy of 9–11 reminds us of our own mortality, which is a good thing because it puts the moment in larger perspective. ‘‘So teach us to number our days that we may incline our hearts to wisdom’’ (Psalm 90).

8 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2002, Vol. 34, No. 1 Second, the rhetoric that the war on terrorism has provoked is inflammatory and dangerous for being cast in black and white terms: On both sides. Three days after 9–11, President Bush declared that the U.S. has a new mission ‘‘to rid the world of evil’’ and on the following Sunday he changed ‘‘evil’’ to ‘‘evil-doers.’’ This is the mirror opposite of the message of Osama bin Laden who, as the Washington Post put the matter, ‘‘looks at the world in very stark black-and-white terms. For him, the U.S. represents the forces of evil which are bringing corruption and domination into the Islamic world.’’ So what we are given are opposite versions of a single holy-war- against-evil.

Thus far we haven’t moved beyond the public domain; many commentators have pointed these things out. Where Buddhism digs deeper—this is my third point in summarizing Loy—is by pointing out how much all our thinking tends to be cast in dualistic format with the suffering this leads to. Good vs. evil dualism leans toward an ‘‘an eye for an eye’’ morality and away from ‘‘turning the other cheek.’’ It plays into the hands of simplistic thinking, which is exactly what we don’t need today. Buddhism helps us to avoid such thinking through its psychological doctrine of the ‘‘three poisons’’—greed, ill will, and delusion—and its metaphysical doctrine of interdependent origination. The first of these forces us to recognize that the wellsprings of evil reside in all of us—the line between good and evil runs straight through the human heart. The second is a metaphysical field theory. Interdependent origination asks us to recognize that every event is the concatenation, the coming together in a unique way, of everything in existence. Everything depends on everything else. It’s hard to think dualistically if you accept this teaching. And if we do manage to step out of dualism, we see that vengeance is counterproductive. It leads to an escalating chain of violence which, if it is not broken, points toward MAD, mutual assured destruction. (In a macabre sort of way, the acronym is almost poetic.) Buddhism comes down hard against revenge and the hatred that fuels it. ‘‘He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me’’ for those who harbor such thoughts hatred will never cease

‘‘He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me’’ for those who do not harbor such thoughts hatred will cease

In this world hatred is never appeased by hatred; hatred is always appeased by love. This is an ancient law (Dhammapada, 3–5).

Loy doesn’t claim that the underlying points here belong only to Buddhism, and I will take that as license to say that they are insights that transpersonal psychologists, with their openness to the teachings of the wisdom traditions, are in an exceptional position to understand and try to move into public thinking.

KP: Are you optimistic about the future?

HS: I can’t honestly say that I am. I feel like G. K. Chesterton when he wrote, I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire,

Huston Smith on terrorism 9 Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

We are living on the rim of a volcano, and unless the chain of escalating violence is reversed soon—this time I’ll let James Baldwin say it for me. ‘‘God gave Noah the warning sign/This time water, it’s the fire next time.’’

On the other hand, though I’m not optimistic, I am hopeful. Vaclav Havel has helped to distinguish the two. Hope doesn’t turn on the expectation of a happy outcome. It is grounded in the certainty that our endeavors, if we give them our best, make sense no matter how things turn out. Caring for an autistic child can carry hope even if there’s no prospect that the child will ever be normal.

KP: Thank you, Huston.

HS: It has been good to work with you on this important subject.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

BARBER, B. (1995). Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Times Books. The book is an expanded version of an original article that appeared by the author in March 1992, Atlantic Monthly, 269(3), 53–65. A paperback edition was published by Ballantine in 1996. An edition with a new introduction was published by Ballantine Press, November 2001. A follow-up article (entitled ‘‘Beyond Jihad Versus McWorld’’) appeared recently in The Nation Magazine, January 21, 2002. LOY, D. (2001). A new Holy War against evil? The response of an American Buddhist, Eastern Buddhist, 33(2), 122–128. RASHID, A. (2001). Taliban. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. SMITH, H. (2001). Islam: A concise introduction. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. VIDAL, G. (2002). Perpetual war for perpetual peace. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/ Nation Books.

The Authors Huston Smith is internationally known and revered as the premier teacher of world religions and for his best-selling book, The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (the original version of which was published in the 1950s as The Religions of Mankind). He has taught at Washington University, MIT, , and University of California at Berkeley. In 1996 devoted a five-part PBS special, The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith, to his life and work. Among his many other books are: Forgotten Truth; Why Religion Matters: The fate of the human spirit in an age of disbelief; Islam: A concise introduction; and Cleansing : The religious significance of entheogenic plants and chemicals. He is also a long-time supporter and member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

Kaisa Puhakka was Editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1999–2001. She has taught at the State University of West Georgia, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and is currently professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral

10 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2002, Vol. 34, No. 1 Studies. Her publications include Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the horizon of consciousness (co-edited with Tobin Hart and Peter L. Nelson), and some forty journal articles and book chapters in , phenomenology, Eastern thought and practice, psychotherapy, and transpersonal psychology.

Huston Smith on terrorism 11