Huston Smith Quotes

Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of a gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome that count. So don't bankrupt yourself on a momentary positive impulse, only to regret it later. Give thought to giving. Give small things, carefully, and observe the mental processes going along with the act of releasing the little thing you liked. (53) (Quote is actually Robert A F Thurman but Huston Smith, who only wrote the introduction to my edition, seems to be given full credit for this text.)

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the “skin-encapsulated ego.” Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth.

With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming," To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life, And then to come out empty--it is a tragic error. (116) trans by Robert Thurman

Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?

If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.

When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.

We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.

All -isms end up in schisms.

You can never get enough of what you don't really want.

Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for ‘art,’ because for Indians everything is art.

You can’t understand anything unless you unless you understand everything.

Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended.

Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality. — Mother Jones November/December 1997.

If it is possible to be homesick for the world, even places one has never been and knows one will never see, this book is the child of such homesickness.

Science makes major contributions to minor needs, Justice Holmes was fond of saying, adding that religion, however small its successes, is at least at work on the things that matter most.

Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, “the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.

What a strange fellowship this is, the God seekers in every land, lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to the God of all life. How does it sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange ethereal harmony? Does one faith carry the lead or do the parts share in counterpoint and antiphony where not in full throated chorus? We cannot know. All we can do is to listen carefully and with full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the divine.

To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life’s final and fascinating challenge.

Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world.

The disciples of Jesus “found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this (he) is how it would behave… he invited people to see differently instead of telling them what to do or believe…he located the authority of his teaching in his hearer’s hearts, not in himself or God-as-removed.

Some friends accused me of whoring after the Infinite. Well, what better whoredom is there?

What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master.

To try to extinguish the drive for riches with money is like trying to quench a fire by pouring butter over it.

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it—life begins in slime and ends in intelligence—whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: “We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods.” —HUSTON SMITH16 Some philosophers hold

You can find God in the world of everyday affairs as readily as anywhere.11

Heaven and earth are my inner and outer coffins. The sun, moon, and stars are my drapery, and the whole creation my funeral procession. What more do I want?

people approach the goal from different directions, so there must be multiple trails to the common destination.

Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany.

We should witness all things non-reactively, especially our moods and emotions, neither condemning some nor holding on to others.

A nation can assume that the phrase “under God” in its Pledge of Allegiance shows that its citizens believe in God when all it really shows is that they believe in believing in God.

The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine- the imago dei, image of god…And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case, love’s bombardment. The process begins in infancy, where a mother’s initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and as coordination develops, elicits its answering smile… A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love can only take root in children when it comes to them- initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response.

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man’s success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. “Don’t worry,” he yawned. “I’ll tempt him to institutionalize it.” That

If I were asked under what sky the human mind…has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions to some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant—I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life…again I should point to India. Max Müller

The game can be won or lost, but not the player himself. If he has worked hard, he has improved his game and indeed his faculties; this happens in defeat fully as much as in victory. As the contestant is related to his total person, so is the finite self of any particular lifetime related to its underlying Atman.

The Infinite discloses itself, as much of itself as our finite minds can comprehend, by building the universal grammars of language and religion into our brains. We did not create those grammars; they were bequeathed to us.

Today we do not live under a sacred canopy; it is marketing that forms the backdrop of our culture. The message that advertising dins into our conscious and unconscious minds is that fulfillment derives from the things we possess.

Detachment from the finite self or attachment to the whole of things—we can state the phenomenon either positively or negatively. When it occurs, life is lifted above the possibility of frustration and above ennui—the third threat to joy—as well, for the cosmic drama is too spectacular to permit boredom in the face of such vivid identification.

This is why, in sharp contrast to Christians, who have translated their Bible into every known script, Muslims have preferred to teach others the language in which they believe God spoke finally with incomparable force and directness

Emerson argued that “the whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men are convertible, and they are. They want awakening, [and for that purpose they need teachers] to get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep.” That

The obvious veneration felt by almost all who knew him is contagious, and the reader is soon caught up with his disciples in the sense of being in the presence of something close to wisdom incarnate. Perhaps the most striking thing about him was his combination of a cool head and a warm heart, a blend that shielded him from sentimentality, on the one hand, and indifference, on the other. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest rationalists of all times, resembling in this respect no one as much as Socrates.

No individual is solely reflective, emotional, active, or experimental, and different life situations call for different resources to be brought into play. Most people will, on the whole, find travel on one road more satisfactory than on others and will consequently tend to keep close to it; but Hinduism encourages people to test all four and combine them as best suits their needs.

In samadhi, the mind continues to think, but of no thing. This does not mean that it is thinking of nothing, that it is a total blank. It has perfected the paradox of seeing the invisible. It is filled with that which is “separated from all qualities, neither this nor that, without form, without a name.

The bhakta’s approach include repeating God’s name, as in praying without ceasing “keep the name of the Lord spinning in the midst of all your activities.” Washing or weaving, planting or shopping, imperceptibly but indelibly these verbal droplets of aspiration soak down into the subconscious, loading it with the divine.

Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to how they connect, students are given no sense of the whole, if indeed their instructors think a seamless fabric of knowledge exists.

These are what people really want, and they want them infinitely. To state the full truth, then, we must say that what people really would like to have is infinite being, infinite knowledge, and infinite bliss. Moksha is the release from the finitude that restricts us from the limitless being, consciousness, and bliss we desire.

A great anatomist used to close his opening lecture to beginning medical students with words that apply equally to our own undertaking. “In this course,” he would say, “we shall be dealing with flesh and bones and cells and sinews, and there are going to be times when it’s all going to seem terribly cold-blooded. But never forget. It’s alive!” II.

In the cyclonic mess of Kyoto traffic, two cars scrape bumpers. Both drivers leap out. Each bows, apologizing profusely for his carelessness.

There comes a time,” Aldous Huxley wrote, “when one asks even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, is this all?

For “what the soul is to the body of man,” Saint Augustine was to write, “that the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church.

Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds; Waiting that hour that ripens to their doom. This

Suffering led the Buddha to enlightenment, and it may cause us, against our will, to grow in compassion, awareness, and possibly eventually peace.

Historical figures lose their center when they become anxious over the outcome of their actions.

We need the courage as well as the inclination to consult, and profit from, the “wisdom traditions of mankind.” —E.F. Schumacher In

Do not seek after truth. Merely cease to hold opinions.

Symbolism is the science of understanding the relations between the multiple levels of reality.

The Transcendent was my morning meal, we had the Eternal at lunch, and I ate a slice of the Infinite at dinner.

In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.

There are worse kinds of infidelity than the sexual. I was living with one of the most interesting women in the world, and too often my attention was elsewhere.

terms. A nation can assume that the phrase “under God

We are limited in joy, knowledge, and being, the three things people really want.

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s way of establishing parity is appealing: “Science gives us major answers to minor questions, while religion gives us minor answers to major questions.

Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is the highest value.… He enters a battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if he were attending a funeral. (ch. 31) That

To borrow an image from Nietzsche, we have all been summoned to become Cosmic Dancers who do not rest heavily on a single spot but lightly turn and leap from one position to another.

Raja yoga with asanas (poses and breathing) is a way of leading the inquirer to direct personal experience of the “beyond that is within.” Its method is willed introversion, one of the classic implements of creative genius in any line of endeavor. Its intent is to drive the psychic energy of the self to its deepest part to activate the last continent of the true self

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it—life begins in slime and ends in intelligence—whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: “We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods.” —HUSTON SMITH16

If I were asked under what sky the human mind…has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions to some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant—I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life…again I should point to India. Max Müller On

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man,” James wrote of the alcoholic high. “To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature. . . . The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

Nisker wasn’t really in the mood for an LSD trip. After all, he was in a car and heading toward the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then Scoop started thinking to himself. Well, the guy is the “high priest of LSD.” What else can I do? When else am I going to get a chance like this? So, Nisker dropped the acid. By the time they got to the radio station Scoop was so stoned he couldn’t put two words together. But Leary sat down behind the microphone and just let out all this beautiful, flowing prose. He was his usual glib, funny self. Nisker was melting into the floor, mumbling to himself. But there was Leary, totally in charge of himself—so charismatic, so facile. What a performance!

All the basic principles of Bhakti yoga are richly exemplified in Christianity. From the Hindu point of view, Christianity is one great brilliantly lit highway toward God, not greater than other paths, but more clearly marked. On this path God is conceived differently than in jnana yoga, where the guiding image was of an infinite sea of being underlying the waves of our finite selves. This sea typified the all-pervading Self, which is a much within us as without.

A lamp can be covered with dust and dirt to the point of obscuring its light completely. The problem life poses for the human self is to cleanse the dross of its being to the point where its infinite center can shine forth in full display. p22

The ultimate truth is that nirvana is not infinitely distant but infinitely near, reaching gracefully toward us, as it were, and being the ground on which we already stand if we but knew this. Only the blinders of egoism hide this truth from us.

We need to approach this question of being not only spatially, but also in terms of time. Our everyday experience provides a wedge for doing so. Strictly speaking, every moment of our lives is a dying; the I of that moment dies, never to be reborn. I endure through the moments-experiencing them, without being identical with any of them in it singularity. Hinduism carries this notion a step further. It posits an extensive self that lives successive lives in the way a single life lives successive moments.

A second normal feature of religion is ritual, which was actually religion’s cradle, for anthropologists tell us that people danced out their religion before they thought it out. Religion arose out of celebration and its opposite, bereavement, both of which cry out for collective expression. When we are crushed by loss or when we are exuberant, we want not only to be with people; we want to interact with them in ways that make the interactions more than the sum of their parts—this relieves our isolation.

One of the major esoteric movements in the twentieth century, Traditionalism, takes as its central belief the existence of a primordial spiritual tradition, which was revealed by a divine source and flourished in the ancient past, but which has been subsequently lost. The founder of Traditionalism is generally considered to be the French metaphysician René Guénon, but other Traditionalists include the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, the philosopher Huston Smith, and the far-right Italian esotericist Julius Evola.

He renamed India’s untouchables harijan, “God’s people,” and raised them to human stature. And in doing so he provided the nonviolent strategy as well as the inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s comparable civil rights movement in the United States. Gandhi

We have seen that psychology has accustomed us to the fact there is more to ourselves than we suspect. Like the eighteenth century European view of the earth, our minds have their own darkest Africas, their unmapped Borneos, their Amazonian basins. Their bulk continues to await exploration. Hinduism sees the mind’s hidden continents as stretching to infinity. Infinite in being, infinite in awareness, there is nothing beyond them that remains unknown. Infinite in joy, too, for there is nothing alien in them to mar their beatitude.

The point of the story is that the universe is one gigantic Wishing Tree, with branches that reach into every heart. The cosmic process decrees that sometime or other, in this life or another, each of these wishes will be granted—together, of course, with consequences.

There is within us—in even the blithest, most lighthearted among us—a fundamental dis-ease. It acts like an unquenchable fire that renders the vast majority of us incapable in this life of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies in the marrow of our bones and the deep regions of our souls. All great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion tries to name and analyze this longing. We are seldom in direct touch with it, and indeed the modern world seems set on preventing us from getting in touch with it by covering it with an unending phantasmagoria of entertainments, obsessions, addictions, and distractions of every sort. But the longing is there, built into us like a jack-in-the-box that presses for release. Two great paintings suggest this longing in their titles—Gauguin’s Who Are We? Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going? and de Chirico’s Nostalgia for the Infinite—but I must work with words. Whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its confining walls of finitude and mortality.

After all our time living together, my identity is not self-contained: I am the way I am because she is the way she is. This “marriage of true minds” Shakespeare spoke of does not occur at the wedding nuptials but after sixty-five years of wedlock we may be getting there.

peyote. Peyote is illegal in the United States at present. It is classified as a Schedule One drug—right up there with heroin—and the mistake begins right there, for peyote is a harmless cactus to which addiction is virtually impossible and to which not a single misdemeanor (let alone felony) has ever been traced. When we place this record alongside the ravages of alcohol the picture becomes surrealistic. Because alcohol is the sacrament of the dominant religion of the land, it passes muster; but peyote is “their” sacrament, so it does not.

Everything I do for my private wellbeing adds another layer to my ego, and in thickening it insulates me more from God. Conversely, every act done without thought for myself diminishes my self-centeredness until finally no barrier remains to separate me from the Divine. The

The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life (in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts.

it is again: that Hindu belief that all of life is maya, illusion. Once we see life as a game, no more consequential than a game of chess, then the world seems a lot lighter, a lot happier. Personal failure becomes “as small a cause for concern as playing the role of loser in a summer theater performance,” writes Huston Smith in his book The World’s Religions. If it’s all theater, it doesn’t matter which role you play, as long as you realize it’s only a role. Or, as Alan Watts said: “A genuine person is one who knows he is a big act and does it with complete zip.

How can such a love for Being be engendered? The things for the world clamor for our affection so incessantly that it may be marveled that Being who can neither be seen nor heard can ever become their rival. Enter Hinduism’s myths, her magnificent symbols, her several hundred images of God, her rituals that keep turning night and day like never ending prayer wheels. It is obtuse to confused Hinduism’s images with idolatry, and their multiplicity with polytheism. They are runways from which the sense-laden human spirit can rise for its “flight of the alone to the Alone.

If we were to take Hinduism as a whole...and compress it into a single affirmation, we would find it saying: You can have what you want. This sounds promising, but it throws the problem back in our laps. For what do we want? It is easy to give a simple answer- not easy to give a good one. p13

Certainly truths are to be found in all the philosophers, and above all half-truths, but these truths are flanked with errors and inconsistencies, and there is moreover no need for them; hence it is pointless to dwell on them. Partial truths are only to be accepted in the domain of traditional orthodoxy, because they are only acceptable in the context of the total Truth, which alone guarantees their exactitude and their efficacy. To think while denying the total Truth, which is both objective and subjective, is completely inconsistent; it is not really thinking. [Letter on Existentialism to Huston Smith]

God has made different religions to suit different aspirations, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole-hearted devotion. One may eat a cake with icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way.

It will enable each person to realize that he is not a game-playing robot put on this planet to be given a Social Security number and to be spun on the assembly line of school, college, career, insurance, funeral, goodbye. . . . Man is going to have to explore the infinity of inner space, to discover the terror and adventure and ecstasy that lie within us all.

From the majestic pontifical High Mass in St. Peter's to the quiet simplicity of a Quaker meeting; from the intellectual sophistication of Saint Thomas Aquinas to the moving simplicity of spirituals such as "Lord, I want to be a Christian"; from St. Paul's in London, the parish Church of Great Britain, to Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta-- all this is Christianity.

When a wild elephant is to be tamed and trained, the best way to begin is by yoking it to one that has already been through the process... "When shall we come to recognize that health is as contagious as disease, virtue as contagious as vice, cheerfulness as contagious as moroseness?" One of the three things for which we should give thanks every day, according to Shankara, is the company of the holy; for as bees cannot make honey unless together, human beings cannot make progress on the Way [Buddhism] unless they are supported by a field of confidence and concern that Truthwinners generate. The Buddha agrees. We should associate with Truthwinners, converse with them, serve them, observe their ways, and imbibe by osmosis their spirit of love and compassion. p105

The word "my" always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed; when I speak of my book or my jacket, I do not suppose that I am those things. But I also speak of my body, my mind, or my personality, giving evidence thereby that in some sense I consider myself as distinct from them as well. What is this "I" that possesses my body and mind, but is not their equivalent?

Dismiss these post facto accounts as legends if we must; there is no question but that in his life as the Buddha the springs of tenderness gushed abundant. Wanting to draw the arrows of sorrow from everyone he met, he gave to each his sympathy, his enlightenment, and the strange power of soul, which, even when he barely spoke a word, gripped the hearts of his visitors and left them transformed.

The last is the worship of God in innumerable forms. Each is a symbol that points to something beyond; and as none exhausts God’s actual nature, the entire array is needed to complete the picture of God’s aspects and manifestations. But though the representations point equally to God, it s advisable for each devotee to form a lifelong attachment to one, so only then can its meaning deepen and its full power become accessible. The ideal form for most people will be one of God’s incarnations, for God can be loved most readily in human form because our hearts are already attuned to loving people. Many Hindus readily acknowledge Christ as an incarnation as well as Rama, Krishna, and the Buddha. Whenever the stability of the world is seriously threatened, God descends to address the imbalance.

To state the full truth, then, we must say that what people would really like to have is infinite being, infinite knowledge, and infinite bliss. They might have to settle for less, but this is what they really want. To gather the wants into a single word, what people really want is liberation (moksha)—release from the finitude that restricts us from the limitless being, consciousness, and bliss our hearts desire.

III. Buddhism The Man Who Woke Up Buddhism begins with a man. In his later years, when India was afire with his message and kings themselves were bowing before him, people came to him even as they were to come to Jesus asking what he was.1 How many people have provoked this question—not “Who are you?” with respect to name, origin, or ancestry, but “What are you? What order of being do you belong to? What species do you represent?” Not Caesar, certainly. Not Napoleon, or even Socrates. Only two: Jesus and Buddha. When the people carried their puzzlement to the Buddha himself, the answer he gave provided an identity for his entire message. “Are you a god?” they asked. “No.” “An angel?” “No.” “A saint?” “No.” “Then what are you?” Buddha answered, “I am awake.” His answer became his title, for this is what Buddha means. The Sanskrit root budh denotes both to wake up and to know. Buddha, then, means the “Enlightened One,” or the “Awakened One.” While the rest of the world was wrapped in the womb of sleep, dreaming a dream known as the waking state of human life, one of their number roused himself. Buddhism begins with a man who shook off the daze, the doze, the dream-like vagaries of ordinary awareness. It begins with a man who woke up. His

Derived from the root s-l-m, which means primarily “peace” but in a secondary sense “surrender,” its full connotation is “the peace that comes when one’s life is surrendered to God.” This makes Islam—together with Buddhism, from budh, awakening—one of the two religions that is named after the attribute it seeks to cultivate; in Islam’s case, life’s total surrender to God. Those who adhere to Islam are known as Muslims. Background

Our life in historical or chronological time, measuring and minding, cautious and comparing, forms the horizontal arm of the cross. Our experience of the unqualified, of inner, immeasurable time (or timelessness), is the cross’s vertical pole. We live in two kinds of time or perspective simultaneously. The horizontal and the vertical are at once quite distinct and entirely overlapping, and to experience their incongruity and confluence is what it means to be human.

[Describing Hinduism] All of us dwell on the bring of the infinite ocean of life's creative power. We carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted and cannot be destroyed. But it is hidden deep, which is what makes life a problem. The infinite is down in the darkest, profoundest vault of our being, in the forgotten well-house, the deep cistern. What if we could bring it to light and draw from it unceasingly. p26

Building upon this early conception of the Church, Christians came to think of it as having a double aspect. Insofar as it consists of Christ and the Holy Spirit dwelling in people and suffusing them with grace and love, it is perfect. Insofar as it consists of fallible human members, it always falls short of perfection.9 The worldly face of the Church is always open to criticism. But its mistakes, Christians hold, have been due to the human material through which it works.

Because this second position is powered by the hope that there may someday be a single world religion, it is well to remind ourselves again of the human element in the religious equation. There are people who want to have their own followers. They would prefer to head their own flock, however small, than be second-in-command in the largest congregation. This suggests that if we were to find ourselves with a single religion tomorrow, it is likely that there would be two the day after. p386

The motions of the average mind, say the Hindus, are about as orderly as those of a crazed monkey cavorting in its cage. Nay, more; like the prancings of a drunk, crazed monkey. Even so we have not conveyed its restlessness; the mind is like a drunken crazed monkey who has been stung by a wasp. What if the mind could be turned from a ping-pong ball into a lump of dough, which when thrown sticks to a all until deliberately removed? Would not its power increase if it could be thus held in focus? Would not its strength be compounded, like the strength of a light bulb when ringed by reflectors? A normal mind can be held to a reasonable extent by the world’s objects. A psychotic mind cannot; it slips at once into uncontrollable fantasy. What if a third condition of mind could be developed, as much above the normal mind as the psychotic mind is below it, a condition in which the mind could be induced to focus protractedly on an object to fathom it deeply? This concentration is the sixth step of raja yoga.

In Buddhism monks recite daily the Five Remembrances, which are: I will lose my youth, my health, my dear ones and everything I hold dear, and finally lose life itself, by the very nature of my being human. These are bitter reminders that the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action. The fact that all the things we hold dear and love are transient does not mean that we should love them less but—as I do Karen and Serena—love them even more. Suffering, the Buddha said, if it does not diminish love, will transport you to the farther shore.

In his book The Next Million Years, Charles Galton Darwin notes that anyone who wishes to make a sizable impact on human history has the choice of three levels at which to work. The agent may choose direct political action, or create a creed, or attempt to change the genetic composition of the human species. The first method is the weakest because the effects of political action seldom outlast their agent. The third is not feasible, for even if we had the knowledge and technique, a genetic policy would be difficult to enforce for even a short period and would almost certainly be dropped before any perceptible effects were achieved. "That is why," Darwin concludes, "a creed gives the best practical hope that man can have for really controlling his future fate." p187

What if the interests of the self were expanded to the point of approximating a God’s eye view of humanity? Seeing all things under the aspect of eternity would make one objective toward oneself, accepting failure as on a par with success in the stupendous human drama of yes and no, positive and negative, push and pull. Personal failure would be as small a cause for concerns as playing a loser in a summer theater performance. How could one feel disappointed in one’s own defeat if one experienced the victor’s joy as also one’s own; if one’s competitor’s success was enjoyed vicariously? Instead of crying impossible, we should perhaps content ourselves with noting how different this would feel from life as it is usually lived, for reports of the greatest spiritual geniuses suggest they rose to something like this perspective

For all we know, the larger part of the motive for trying to expand science is not self-serving; it is merely mistaken. The idealistic element in it is its desire to achieve in the understanding of man what science has achieved in the understanding of matter. Its mistake is in not seeing that the tools for the one are of strictly limited utility for the other, and that the practice of trying to see man as an object which the tools of science will fit leads first to underrating and then to losing sight of his attributes those tools miss. (The mere titles of B.F. Skinner's “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” and Herbert Marcuse's “One-Dimensional Man” will, in opposite ways, suffice.) If it be asked, “But what did the nonscientific approach to man and the world give us?” The answer is: “Meaning, purpose, and a vision in which everything coheres

For against a vast time scale, Hinduism draws a distinction the West is too familiar with- that between chronological age and psychological age. Two people, both forty-six are the same age chronologically, but psychologically one may still be a child and the other an adult. The Hindus extend this distinction to cover multiple life spans, a point we shall take up explicitly when we come to the idea of reincarnation. As a consequence we shall find men and women who play the game of desire with all the zest of nine-year-old cops and robbers; though they know little else, they will die with the sense of having lived to the full and enter their verdict that life is good. But equally, there will be others who play this game as ably, yet find its laurels paltry. Why the difference? The enthusiasts, say the Hindus, are caught in the flush of novelty, whereas the others, having played the game over and over again, seek other worlds to conquer. p18

We are told that we are not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek. The world assumes that evil must be resisted by every means available. We are told to love our enemies and bless those who curse us. The world assumes that friends are to be loved and enemies hated. We are told that the sun rises on the just and the unjust alike. The world considers this undiscriminating; it would like to see clouds over evil people and is offended when they go unpunished. We are told that outcasts and harlots enter the kingdom of God before many who are perfunctorily righteous. Again unfair, the world thinks; respectable people should head the procession. We are told that the gate to salvation is narrow. The world would prefer it to be broad. We are told to be as carefree as birds and flowers. The world counsels prudence. We are told that it is more difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. The world admires wealth. We are told that the happy people are those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart. The world assumes that it is the rich, the powerful, and the well-born who are happy. The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev said that a wind of freedom blows through these teachings that frightens the world and makes us want to deflect them by postponement—not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right: Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message.

If my opinion that substance requires a true unity were founded only on a definition I had formulated in opposition to common usage, *then the dispute would be only one of words*. But besides the fact that most philosophers have taken the term in almost the same fashion, distinguishing between a unity in itself and an accidental unity, between substantial and accidental form, and between perfect and imperfect, natural and artificial mixtures, I take things to a much higher level, and setting aside the question of terminology, *I believe that where there are only beings by aggregation, there aren't any real beings*. For every being by aggregation presupposes beings endowed with real unity, because every being derives its reality only from the reality of those beings of which it is composed, so that it will not have any reality at all if each being of which it is composed is itself a being by aggregation, a being for which we must still seek further grounds for its reality, grounds which can never be found in this way, if we must always continue to seek for them. I agree, Sir, that there are only machines (that are often animated) in all of corporeal nature, but I do not agree that *there are only aggregates of substances, there must also be true substances from which all the aggregates result. We must, then, necessarily come down to the atoms of Epicurus and Cordemoy (which are things you reject along with me), or else we must admit that we do not find any reality in bodies; or finally, we must recognize some substances that have a true unity. I have already said in another letter that the composite made up of the diamonds of the Grand Duke and of the Great Mogul can be called a pair of diamonds, but this is only a being of reason. And when they are brought closer to one another, it would be a being of the imagination or perception, that is to say, a phenomenon. For contact, common motion, and participation in a common plan have no effect on substantial unity. It is true that there are sometimes more, sometimes fewer, grounds for supposing that several things constitute a single thing, in proportion to the extent to which these things are connected. But this serves only to abbreviate our thoughts and to represent the phenomena. It also seems that what constitutes the essence of a being by aggregation is only a mode (*maniére d'être*) of the things of which it is composed. For example, what constitutes the essence of an army is only a mode of the men who compose it. This mode therefore presupposes a substance whose essence is not a mode of substance. Every machine also presupposes some substance in the pieces of which it is made, and there is no plurality without true unities. To put it briefly, I hold this identical proposition, differentiated only by the emphasis, to be an axiom, namely, *that what is not truly* one *being is not truly one* being *either*. It has always been thought that one and being are reciprocal things. Being is one thing and beings are another; but the plural presupposes the singular, and where there is no being still less will there be several beings. What could be clearer? [[I therefore believed that I would be allowed to distinguish beings by aggregation from substances, since these beings have their unity in our mind only, a unity founded on the relations or modes [*modes*] of true substances. If a machine is one substance, a circle of men holding hands will also be one substance, and so will an army, and finally, so will every multitude of substances.]]." —from_Letters to Arnauld_

Lo que el historiador de la religión Huston Smith llamó «el secreto mejor guardado» de la historia ya no era un secreto

More precisely, it works through the body to the mind. Beyond general health, its chief object here is to keep the body from distracting the mind while it concentrates.

The purpose of raja yoga’s fourth step is to prevent such disruptions through the mastery of respiration. The exercises prescribed toward this end are numerous and varied. Some, like learning to breathe in through one nostril and out through the other, sound

Are you a god?” they asked. “No.” “An angel?” “No.” “A saint?” “No.” “Then what are you?” Buddha answered, “I am awake.

The proper name of this religion is Islam. Derived from the root s-l-m, which means primarily “peace” but in a secondary sense “surrender,” its full connotation is “the peace that comes when one’s life is surrendered to God.

At the end of the book. Sir Peter and Lou return to England where he plans to build a laboratory and continue his researches and experiments on airplane motors. They have no more desire for heroin, but, typical of Crowley’s attitudes, they continue to use cocaine occasionally in a religious-erotic context. John Bull and other tabloids denounced this novel as an attempt to seduce England into irresponsible drug abuse, and implied that Crowley was paid for this dirty work by the German High Command. (Actually, the first oath required of candidates for the Ordo Templi Orientis, Crowley’s “magick” freemasonic society, was “I will never allow myself to be mastered by any force or any person,” and it was explicitly stated to the novice that this oath included drink and drugs.) Crowley’s idea, however, lives on. Responsible use of drugs in a religious setting, as an alternative to prohibitive laws that are violated widely, is still urged by persons as diverse as poet Robert Graves, philosopher Alan Watts, Dr. John Lilly, Dr. Humphry Osmond, Dr. Huston Smith, novelist Ken Kesey, and many others; and the conservatives still reply that to adopt such a policy will lead to reckless abuse and chaos. They seem not to have observed that the prohibitive laws they support have already produced precisely those results along with more crime, more violence, and more police corruption.

Stated in my own words, the point comes down to this: minds require eco-niches as much as organisms do, and the mind's eco-niche is its worldview, its sense of the whole of things (however much or little that sense is articulated). Short of madness, there is some fit between the two, and we constantly try to improve that fit. Signs of a poor fit are the sense of meaninglessness, alienation, and anxiety that the twentieth century knew so well. The proof of a good fit is that life and the world make sense. When the fit feels perfect, the energies of the cosmos pour into the believer and empower her to a startling degree. She knows that she belongs. The Ultimate supports her, and the knowledge that it does that produces a wholeness that is solid for fitting as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into the wholeness of the All.

Reminders of the sacred were everywhere, strewn about almost carelessly, we might say. Marco Pallis reported that in the traditional Tibet that he knew the entire landscape seemed to be suffused by the message of the Buddha's teachings. "It came to one with the air one breathed. Birds seemed to sing of it; mountain streams hummed its refrain as they bubbled across the stones. A holy perfume seemed to rise from every flower, at once a reminder and a pointer to what still needed doing. There were times when a man might have been forgiven for supposing himself already in the Pure Land.' In times like those, explicit references to the sacred were hardly necessary, but those times are long gone. Today we do not live under a sacred canopy; it is marketing that forms the backdrop of our culture. The message that advertising dins into our conscious and unconscious minds is that fulfillment derives from the things we possess.

Work can be a vehicle for self-transcendence in either approach, for according to Hindu doctrine every action performed upon the external world reacts on the doer. If I chop down a tree that blocks my view, each stroke of the ax unsettles the tree; but it leaves its mark on me as well, driving deeper into my being my determination to have my way in the world. Everything I do for my private wellbeing adds another layer to my ego, and in thickening it insulates me more from God. Conversely, every act done without thought for myself diminishes my self-centeredness until finally no barrier remains to separate me from the Divine. The

A person who is completely at the disposal of others barely exists. The Spanish ask wryly: “Would you like to become invisible? Have no thought of yourself for two years and no one will notice you.

He who does the task Dictated by duty, Caring nothing For the fruit of the action,

Karma yogis will try to do each thing as it comes as if it were the only thing to be done and, having done it, turn to the next duty in similar spirit.

yoga is a method of training designed to lead to integration or union. But integration of what?

If renunciation always entails the sacrifice of a trivial now for a more promising yet-to-be, religious renunciation is like that of athletes who resist indulgences that could deflect them from their all-consuming goal.

But neither the pursuit nor the attainment brings true happiness.

Eventually, there comes over them the suspicion that they are caught on a treadmill, having to run faster and faster for rewards that mean less and

Muslims are not fond of parental images for God, even when employed metaphorically. To speak of human beings as “God’s children” casts God in too human a mode. It is anthropomorphic.

The first step of every yoga, therefore, involves the cultivation of such habits as non-injury, truthfulness, non-stealing, self-control, cleanliness, contentment, self-discipline,

And Americans were—before the Vietnam War, before the Iraq wars—the darlings of everyone everywhere. On a second world trip a decade later, on which I took students for academic credit, the most treasured gift we could give was a John F. Kennedy half-dollar. There

I had not yet gotten around to the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s Consilience. When I did read it, I discovered on page 286 that people follow religion because it is “easier” than empiricism. That struck a nerve, and provoked a response I shall be candid enough to report. Mr. Wilson: When you have endured an eight-day O-sesshin in a Zen monastery, sitting cross-legged and motionless for twelve hours a day and allowed only three and one-half hours of sleep each night until sleep and dream deprivation bring on a temporary psychosis (my own nondescript self); When you have attended four “rains retreats” at the Insight Buddhist Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, for a total of one complete year of no reading, no writing, no speaking, and eyes always downcast (my wife); When you have almost died from the austerities you underwent before you attained enlightenment under a bo tree in India; When you have been crucified on Golgatha; When you have been thrown to lions in the Roman coliseum; When you have been in a concentration camp and held on to some measure of dignity through your faith; When you have given your life to providing a dignified death for homeless, destitute women gathered from the streets of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), or played out her counterpart with the poor in New York City (Dorothy Day); When, Mr. Wilson, you have undergone any one of these trials, it will then be time to talk about the ease of religion as compared with the ardors of empiricism.

Everything I do for my private wellbeing adds another layer to my ego, and in thickening it insulates me more from God.

Conversely, every act done without thought for myself diminishes my self-centeredness until finally no barrier remains to separate me from the Divine.

Religion arose out of celebration and its opposite, bereavement, both of which cry out for collective expression.

And is it true? And is it true, This most tremendous tale of all… That God was Man in Palestine And lives today in Bread and Wine.   (John Betjeman, Christman)

He is admitting that he is trapped, which realization leads to his desperate cry that we have already quoted, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 14:24). In whatever words it is the cry that every alcoholic has repeated. If there is to be a liberation, it will have to come from without, or better, from above: a higher power.

God has made different religions to suit different aspirations, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole-hearted devotion.

He who does the task Dictated by duty, Caring nothing For the fruit of the action, He is a yogi. (Bhagavad-Gita, VI:I) Hence

Your reasoning is fine, but your experience is limited. Enlarge your experience, and your philosophy will be different.

How many planes there are, we do not know. The levels of nature that science discriminates give us no clue, for these all pertain to size which, being an aspect of space, belongs to our plane only. (We discount as irrelevant for present purposes the peculiar modes of space we experience when dreaming.) The entire size-continuum, from minutest particle to our 26-billion-light-year universe, falls along the horizontal arms we see. The planes that bracket this central one—central from our point of view—may be indefinite in number, but even if they are, something can be said about their antipodes. As the levels of reality array themselves along the vertical axis in descending degrees of reality, reality being (as noted in the preceding chapter) worth's final criterion, the bottom of the arm represents the point—a fraction of a degree above absolute zero as we might say—where being phases out completely; all that could lie beyond this margin is a nothing that is as unthinkable as it is non-existent. The top of the axis represents the opposite of this, that is, everything. Opposites being well acquainted, this everything shares in common with its antithesis the fact that it too cannot be imaged, but unlike complete nothingness it can be conceived. Being we experience, whereas nothing, by itself, we do not. The zenith of being is Being Unlimited, Being relieved of all confines and conditionings. The next chapter will discuss it; for now we simply name it. It is All-Possibility, the Absolute, the In-finite in all the directions that word can possibly point." from_The Forgotten Truth_

The scientific gauge is quantity: space, size, and strength of forces can all be reckoned numerically. The comparable "yardstick" in the traditional hierarchy was quality. It had, over the millennia, two distinct readings that overlapped. To the popular mind it meant essentially euphoria: better meant happier, worse less happy. Reflective minds, on the other hand, considered happiness to be only an aspect of quality, not its defining feature. The word "significance" points us in the direction of the feature they considered fundamental, but significance too was derivative. It was taken for granted that the higher worlds abounded in meaning, significance, and importance, but this was because they were saturated with Being and were therefore more real. *Sat*, *Chit*, *Ananda*: Being, Awareness, and Bliss. All three pertained, but Being, being basic, came first. In the last analysis, the scale in the traditional hierarchy was ontological." —from_The Forgotten Truth_

A sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse, A difficult path is this—the poets declare!2 Science

sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse, A difficult path is this—the poets declare!2 Science

And it was from a Hindu, Swami Satprakashananda with his Christmas talks on “Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” that I received the strongest confirmation—by an outside examiner, as it were—of Jesus’s divine nature.

Religiously conceived, the human opportunity is to transform flashes of illumination into abiding light.

Just as a man carrying on his head a load of wood that has caught fire would go rushing to a pond to quench the flames, even so will the seeker of truth, scorched by the fires of life—birth, death, self-deluding futility—go rushing to a teacher wise to the ways of the things that matter most.

The only thing that is unqualifiedly good is extended vision, the enlargement of one’s understanding of the ultimate nature of things.

Huston Smith’s book Why Religion Matters

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure.

What is to be known in raja yoga's final stage is without limits. The mind continues to think- if that is the right word- but of no thing. This does not mean that it is thinking of nothing, that it is a total blank. It has perfected the paradox of seeing the invisible. It is filled with that which is "separated from all qualities, neither this nor that, without form, without a name." p49

[In Hinduism] To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life's final and fascinating challenge. p53

It is possible to climb life's mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge. p73

[w/r/t Taoism] "When she died I was in despair, as any man well might be. But then I realized that before she was born she had no body, and it became clear to me that the same process of change that brought her to birth eventually brought her to death. If someone is tired and has gone to lie down, we do not pursue her with hooting and bawling. She whom I have lost has lain down to sleep for a while in the chamber between heaven and earth. To wail and groan while my wife is sleeping would be to deny nature's sovereign law. So I refrain." p216

We can cite the tribesman who pointed out that the circles in spider webs are sticky, whereas the radii are not. This means, he said, that if you wander from side to side in life you get stuck, but if you move toward its center you don't. p380

If we learned one thing from that experience it was how foolish it was to use a double-blind experiment with psychedelics. After five minutes, no one’s fooling anyone. We also learned that we all had to do the work together, with no principal investigator, because once you put that pill in your mouth, you are the principal investigator—like it or not.

Leary’s career and life would veer so far off course in the 1960s and 1970s that it’s easy to forget that he was once considered a rising star in mainstream psychology.

The 1950s, a decade that would become synonymous with unquestioning conformity, had seen the rise of the other-directed character—all those middle-class, upwardly mobile businessmen and consumers who focused on other people’s opinions of them. By the early 1960s, however, more and more Americans were starting to follow an inner voice. There was a new kind of empathic individualism, a nonconformist mentality that would soon see full flowering in the psychedelic drug culture. One way to see this change is through film and theater—the social journey from Death of a Salesman to Easy Rider.

Leary was looking for another way to relate to patients, and to people in general. If someone needs psychological help, why not just go to the guy’s house, sit around the kitchen table, drink some coffee, and talk about it? Psychologists should present themselves as resources, not as doctors or authority figures. Metzner found Leary’s method very egalitarian, and very refreshing.

During his life Huston came to believe that people turn to religion the way sunflowers bend in the direction of the light. We reach for God “in the way that the wings of birds point to the reality of air.

Late in his life, Leary looked back on everything he’d said over the years and compared his level of truthfulness to the batting average of major-league baseball players. “About a third of what I’ve said is just flat out bullshit,” he told a friend. “About a third of what I’ve said is just dead wrong. But a third of what I’ve said have been home runs. So I’m batting .333, which puts me in the Hall of Fame.

the middle road is rarely taken once Time magazine and congressional subcommittees get into the act.

Who was he? Perhaps The Trickster said it best when he quipped, “You get the Timothy Leary you deserve.

Clark suggests that saint, at least as William James defines the word, may be a better label for Timothy Leary. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James speaks of saints having “a feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of an Ideal Power.

Leary and Alpert’s ouster from Harvard had gotten international media attention, and the trickle of guests soon turned into a flood. All that publicity inspired a wave of protohippies to wash up onto their shores. They arrived broke and unkempt, begging for food, shelter, and cosmic illumination.

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know.

Some people are primarily reflective. Others are basically emotional. Still others are essentially active. Finally, some are experimentally inclined.

the biggest mistake religion ever made was to get mixed up with people.

true religion begins with the quest for meaning and value beyond self-centeredness. It renounces the ego’s claims to finality.

Experiments have shown that even monkeys will work longer and harder to discover what is on the other side of a trapdoor than they will for either food or sex.

By and large, life is powered less by reason than by emotion; and of the many emotions that crowd the human heart, the strongest is love.

Japam is the practice of repeating God’s name.

The name the Hindus give to the supreme reality is Brahman, which has a dual etymology, deriving as it does from both br, to breathe, and brih, to be great.

Sow a thought and reap an act, sow an act and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny”—

All of us dwell on the brink of the infinite ocean of life’s creative power. We carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted and cannot be destroyed. But it is hidden deep, which is what makes life a problem.

Buddha preached a religion devoid of authority.

It is the nature of scorpions to bite. It is the nature of yogis to help others when they can.

that there is no reason he should grieve. He will perhaps say it was too early for me to leave for the forest. But even if affection should prevent me from leaving my family just now of my own accord, in due course death would tear us apart, and in that we would have no say. Birds settle on a tree for a while, and then go their separate ways again. The meeting of all living beings must likewise inevitably end in their parting. This world passes away and disappoints the hopes of everlasting attachment. It is therefore unwise to have a sense of ownership for people who are united with us as in a dream—for a short while only and not in fact.3

The creative quietude of philosophical Taoism means to align one’s daily life to the Tao, to ride its boundless tide and delight in its flow…and to perfect a life of wu wei- pure effectiveness and creative quietude (supreme activity and supreme relaxation.) We are nurtured by a force that is infinitely subtle, infinitely intricate; it is a consummate gracefulness born from an abundant vitality that has no need for abruptness or violence. One simply lets the Tao flow in and flow out again until all Life becomes a Dance in which there is neither feverishness or imbalance. Water is the closest parallel to the Tao and the prototype of wu wei. It is supple, strong, and sensuous; and it adapts and supports and buoys and erodes.

The world’s offerings are not bad. By and large they are good. Some of them are good enough to command our enthusiasm for many lifetimes. Eventually, however, every human being comes to realize with Simone Weil that “there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this world is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness.”2 When this point is reached, one finds oneself asking even of the best this world can offer, “Is this all?

We live in a fantastic century. I brush aside the incredible discoveries of science, and the razor’s edge between doom and fulfillment onto which they have pushed us, to speak of the new situation among peoples. Lands across the planet have become our neighbors, China across the street, the Middle East at our back door. Young people with backpacks are everywhere, and those who remain at home are treated to an endless parade of books, documentaries, and visitors from abroad. We hear that East and West are meeting, but it is an understatement. They are being flung at one another, hurled with the force of atoms, the speed of jets, the restlessness of minds impatient to learn the ways of others. When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take one another seriously.

To claim salvation as the monopoly of any one religion is like claiming that God can be found in this room but not the next, in this attire but not another...Truth is one: sages call it by different names.

Unlettered peoples are ignorant of many things, but they are seldom stupid because, having to rely on their memories, they are more likely to remember what is important. Literate peoples, by contrast, are apt to get lost in their vast libraries of recorded information.I —HUSTON SMITH, RELIGION SCHOLAR

The word "my" always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed; when I speak of my book or my jacket, I do not suppose that I am those things. But I also speak of my body, my mind, or my personality, giving evidence thereby that in some sense I consider myself as distinct from them as well. What is this "I" that possesses my body and mind, but is not their equivalent?” Again, science tells me that there is nothing in my body that was there seven years ago, and my mind and my personality have undergone comparable changes. Yet, throughout their manifold revisions, I have remained in some way the same person, the person who believed now this, now that; who once was young and is now old. What is this something in my makeup, more constant than body or mind, that has endured the changes? Seriously pondered, this question can disentangle one's Self from lesser identifications.

يمكنك أن تفعل كل شيء بواسطة الحراب إلا أن تجلس عليها - تاليراند - ص 274 --- أن تحكم هو أن تبقى مستقيماً ، فإذا قمت سيدي ، بقيادة الناس على الصراط المستقيم ، فمن من رعاياك سيجرؤ أو يجازف بالخروج عن الخط؟! ... إنك لو أبديت رغبة صادقة بالخير ، فإن شعبك سيكون خيراً صالحاً أيضاً. إن فضيلة واستقامة الأمير كالريح ، وفضيلة واستقامة الشعب كالعشب ، ومن طبيعة العشب أن ينحني عندما تهب عليه الريح - كونفوشيوس - ص 275 --- عندما لا يعود هناك معنى للأبوين في نظر أبنائهم ، فإن الحضارة تصبح في خطر - 271

it. I was the professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was the horror that I knew inside that I didn’t know.

It was David McClelland, his old mentor at Wesleyan, who got him the Harvard job. McClelland had moved up the academic ladder and had brought his bright young protégé along. Alpert was given a huge corner office in an old mansion that housed the Center for Personality Research, which was part of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations

For what is a human being? A body? Certainly, but anything else? A personality that includes mind, memories, and propensities that have derived from unique trajectory of life experiences? This, too, but anything more? Some say no, but Hinduism disagrees. Underlying the human self and animating it is a reservoir of being that never dies, is never exhausted, and is unrestricted in consciousness and bliss. The infinite center of life, this hidden self, or Atman, is no less than Brahman, the Godhead.

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.

The motions of the average mind, say the Hindus, are about as orderly as those of a crazed monkey cavorting about its cage. Nay, more; like the prancing of a drunk, crazed monkey. Even so we have not conveyed its restlessness; the mind is like a drunken, crazed monkey that has St. Vitus' Dance. To do justice to our theme, however, we must go a final step. The mind is like a drunken crazed monkey with St. Vitus' Dance who has just been stung by a wasp.

The word 'my' always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed; when I speak of my book or my jacket, I do not suppose that I am those things. But I also speak of my body, my mind, or my personality, giving evidence thereby that in some sense I consider myself as distinct from them as well. What is this 'I' that possesses my body and mind, but is not their equivalent? Again, science tells me that there is nothing in my body that was there seven years ago, and my mind and my personality have undergone comparable changes. Yet, throughout their manifold revisions, I have remained in some way the same person, the person who believed now this, now that; who once was young and is now old. What is this something in my makeup, more constant than body or mind, that has endured the changes? Seriously pondered, this question can disentangle one's Self from lesser identifications.

If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is

If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.

Four Noble Virtues: loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, and joy in the happiness and wellbeing of others.

Zen is not interested in theories about enlightenment; it wants the real thing.

Islam honors Jesus as a prophet and accepts his virgin birth; Adam’s and Jesus’ souls are the only two that God created directly.

A Christian is someone who has found no tincture equal to Christ.

As water, ice, and steam, H2O assumes states that are liquid, solid, and gaseous while retaining its chemical identity.