The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ he's outgrown. Or to use a different metaphor: A historical building, because of zoning regulations, retains its old facade but is entirely renovated inside. Likewise, his serene childhood Christianity Huston has refurbished from within, with panelings and moldings hardly known to Christianity before.

      At age sixteen Huston left China to attend college in America. His ship sailing across the Pacific crossed centuries, from a missionary backwater in Asia to high-tech America, with its wheels turning and churning, all science and rationality and material progress. At age sixteen Huston felt that this-worldly sleek modernity was heaven on earth, salvation in secular terms. He mastered this secularized salvation oddly from a theologian, the renowned Henry Wieman, his professor at the University of Chicago (and subsequently his father-in-law), who had advanced religion to the point where it could dispense with, well, religion. Unitarians—so runs an old joke—believe in one God at most. In Wieman's theology the Creator has been replaced by the creative process, which is extraordinary but not supernatural; Christ the Redeemer, replaced by a Jesus who catalyzes his disciples’ creative ability to transcend societal limitations. In his twenties Huston believed in this heavenly city in the earthly here and now where everyone would be educated, equal, materially satisfied, and emotionally content. This is the modern Enlightenment (and for a while Huston's) vision: remove theological distraction, focus on what we can rationally control, and we may improve this present world until we need no other. All the founding fathers of the modern world, from Lenin and Sun Yat-sen to Atatürk and Nehru, had subscribed to some version of this beautiful secular dream.

      Huston watched that semi-utopian dream—so new, so shining, so promising—shatter into pieces. All the world, Africa and Asia and the Middle East, was expected to xerox into secular middle-class replicas of Euro-America. The purveyors of this visionary modernism were caught off-guard and stunned when religious fundamentalists—instead of fading into inconsequence—began assuming control of politics and governments. Huston was early in perceiving the limitations in the Enlightenment vision. If Huston was prescient, though, it was because a worldview in which spirituality was marginalized had failed to satisfy him personally. Although he fought for racial and economic justice, from his childhood lingered more elusive longings and meanings that no civil polity, no matter how just, can fulfill. If the physical world is all, Huston thought, then we are like condemned prisoners on death row, trying to forget our situation by ordering up as tasty a last meal as possible.

      All the “principal architects of the modern mind” (as he calls them in Why Religion Matters) had thought in a way Huston was ceasing to think. The intellectual headmasters of l'école moderne had all been, he now realized, rabidly antireligious. One had likened religion to a drug (Marx); another compared it to useless extra baggage (Darwin); a third, to a slave's mentality (Nietzsche); while the fourth dismissed it in one word, an illusion (Freud). Huston would hear similar disparagements about his chosen field his whole professional life. His colleagues would wonder, sometimes aloud, how anyone so likable and intelligent could believe such mumbo-jumbo and not only believe it but actually teach it in a classroom. At MIT a social scientist came up to Huston and with a witty double entendre asked, “Do you know the difference between you and me? I count and you don't.”

      His secular period now behind him, Huston was counting in a different way, or rather counting on something else. Indeed, he may well have become the first person of such prominence in contemporary academia to take religion seriously. The religion department, in the few universities that then had one, had a bias, strange to say, against the very thing they taught. For the modern study of religion took place within the modern view of reality, which denies to religion (unlike politics, say, or economics) a legitimacy of its own. What was taught as religion was in effect sociology or history or anthropology, using religion as its case study. When Huston read John Updike's Roger's Version, he found a passage he could have written himself. A Jesus freak confronts the professor of religion:

      What you call religion around here is what other people call sociology. That's how you teach it, right? Everything from the Gospels to The Golden Bough, Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, it all happened, it's historical fact, it's anthropology, it's ancient texts, it's humanly interesting, right? But that's so safe. How can you go wrong? Not even the worst atheist in the world denies that people have been religious.…[S]tudying all that stuff doesn't say anything, doesn't commit you to anything, except some perfectly harmless, humane cultural history. What I'm coming to talk to you about is God as a fact, a fact about to burst upon us, right up out of Nature.

      The courses Huston offered in world religions did not play it safe. He tried to teach students about the vast unexplored human possibilities that he was in the process of learning himself through encountering the world's religions.

      For instance? The most important thing Huston discovered was that there are radically different ways of being. Different people have contrary emotional responses to the same social stimulus; they give the same phenomenon opposite interpretations and then mistake that interpretation for the objective world. Venturing beyond Judeo-Christianity, Huston was amazed: all people believe alike even less than they all physically look alike. Dissimilar predispositions had proliferated into divers paths to salvation. In Hinduism, for instance, there are four basic human temperaments, hence there are four kinds of yogis. There are karma yogis (e.g., Gandhi) who attain liberation through action, and there are bhakti yogis (e.g., Saint Francis or Mother Teresa) who have great feeling and love their way to salvation. Raja yogis (e.g., the Buddha) meditate their way there, while jnana yogis reach the ultimate goal through intellect or vision. Thus Huston came to realize that the world is incorrigibly plural. And in a shock of recognition Huston identified himself as a jnana yogi, somebody who could use his intelligence, his teaching and writing, to help resacramentalize the world.

      How can life be resacramentalized? Huston realized: Not easily, not merely by thinking it so. Lasting salvation rarely occurs in a book-lined study, and the words Huston wrote in such places reflected what he had experienced outside of them. He traveled to Japan and India; he sought out sages and swamis; he lived in ashrams and monasteries; he participated in retreats and sesshins and kumbla melas. He also spent time on Native American Indian reservations and befriended psychics and experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, for ways to enhance and ennoble the human pilgrimage.

      Back in the 1960s when you said you'd returned from a trip, you might be asked, Which kind? Huston was interested in both kinds, voyages outward and voyages inward. Indeed, some cultural histories remember Huston less for what he wrote than for what he ingested. Although his use of mescaline was infrequent, Huston never denied the importance of his experience. In the blink of an eye, or rather in swallowing a pill, the curtains seemed to part, opening up another, the mystic's world(view).

      The curtains part. On New Year's Eve, 1961, when Huston took two tabs of mescaline at Timothy Leary's house, it might have been odd if he hadn't. Far from bearing a stigma, hallucinogenic drugs then carried a positive connotation, a gateway to elusive wisdom. Huston recalled William James's experience after taking nitrous oxide (laughing gas):

      Our normal waking consciousness…is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different…. [A]pply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all there completeness….No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

      Huston had read these sentences before; on the night of January 1, at Leary's house, he lived them. Mescaline allowed the mystical vision he knew from books to rise up through his senses. After taking the mescaline, his awareness crossed through the gateway of the three dimensions into normally hidden aspects of existence that evidently had been waiting there, as James had said, behind the thinnest of partitions. He laughed to think how the great religious visionaries of history, had they experiences like this—and they probably had—were just a bunch of hack reporters. In a suburban house in Newton, Massachusetts, СКАЧАТЬ