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Forgotten Truth - The Common Vision of the World's Religions By Huston Smith. (Outline Prepared by George Klimowicz). Preface.
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Forgotten Truth - The Common Vision of the World's Religions By Huston Smith (Outline Prepared by George Klimowicz)
Preface The thesis of this book is that how things looked to people everywhere until modern science threw the West temporarily off-balance has helpful things to suggest toward the creation of a viable pattern for our time.
Preface • Four additional points: • 1. Science is conceding that invisibles exist, precede the visible and create it. • 2. This book deals with metaphysical not social hierarchies. • 3. The critique of Darwinism (as distinct from evolution) is gaining support. • 4. On their own plane social problems are unsolvable.
Chapter 1:The Way Things Are Our best hope for a true universal view of reality is the convergent vision of the worlds great religious teachers, philosophers, mystics and prophets rather than a scientific secular view.
Chapter 1:The Way Things Are I. The modern, scientific, or secular view of reality • A. Hierarchical: Macro-world, meso-world, and micro-world • B. Gauged by quantity: space, size and strength of forces all described precisely by numbers
Chapter 1:The Way Things Are II. The traditional, primordial, humanistic or sacred view of reality • A. Hierarchical: Heavens, earth, hells • B. Gauged by quality: being, awareness, bliss all described ambiguously with words
Chapter 1:The Way Things Are III. Science cannot deal with things that cannot be measured, but these things cannot be excluded in taking a universal view of reality • A. Values in their final and proper sense • B. Purposes • C. Life meanings • D. Quality
Chapter 1:The Way Things Are IV. Our best hope for a true universal view of reality is the convergent vision of the worlds great religious teachers, philosophers mystics and prophets
Chapter 2: Symbolism of Space: The Three-Dimensional Cross • A three-dimensional cross is the most adequate model of reality that space can provide
Chapter 2: Symbolism of Space: The Three-Dimensional Cross I. The view of reality as multileveled causes a misunderstanding: levels imply space, space entails distance and distance spells separation. • A. But separation is what religion seeks to overcome. • B. God is "out there" in power and majesty but being everywhere is at the same time "nearer than our jugular vein"
Chapter 2: Symbolism of Space: The Three-Dimensional Cross II. A three-dimensional cross is the most adequate model of reality that space can provide • A. The vertical axis intersects all the planes of existence and ranks them in a hierarchy of being and worth • 1. At the middle, the only horizontal arms we can see represents the human plane, the terrestrial plane, the plane of this world • 2. The top of the vertical axis represents the supreme plane, the Infinite • B. The two horizontal arms represent space and time on our particular plane • C. The center from which the arms protrude symbolizes resolution of two kinds • 1. Union of complements • 2. Resolution of opposites
Chapter 3:The Levels of Reality The Terrestrial Plane, The Intermediate Plane, The Celestial Plane, and The Infinite are the four levels of reality. Our minds are incapable of grasping the Infinite. But truth does not need us and is in no way dependent upon our powers of conceptualization.
Chapter 3:The Levels of Reality I. The Terrestrial Plane (The gross, the material, the sensible, the corporeal, the phenomenal, or the human plane)
Chapter 3:The Levels of Reality II. The Intermediate Plane (the subtle, the "animic" or the psychic plane often encountered in phantasms that have no sensible counterparts) • A. Animate phantasms - Ghosts, departed souls, our own subtle bodies disengaged as in sleep • B. Inanimate phantasms - impersonal furniture of the psychic plane - most importantly the archetypes • C. The Psychic plane houses evil as well as good
Chapter 3:The Levels of Reality III. The Celestial Plane - The sphere of the personal God, the God of "Theism" • A. The source of what illuminates the lower planes • B. Source of what we encounter in tangible objects, universals such as beauty, goodness, justice • C. Three points about theism, God's personal mode: • 1. The view is natural - it is the way he appears to us. • 2. It is true but not his final mode or reality. • 3. Theism is not the final truth - the final reality is unlimited.
Chapter 3:The Levels of Reality IV. The Infinite - God in his ultimate nature • A. Four points on God's Infinite nature: • 1. Only negative terms characterize it literally - infinite, unconditioned, ineffable, immutable. • 2. Positive terms apply to the Infinite only analogically - e.g. The Infinite is more like a lion that exists than a unicorn that does not. • 3. The degree to which positive terms seem apposite will vary because it depends on the experience (or the imaginative capacity) of the person who is using them. • 4. The most effective way to underscore the negative side of analogy - how much attributes when predicated of the Infinite differ from the modes in which we usually encounter them - is through paradox. • B. The above four points show our minds incapable of grasping the Infinite. But truth does not need us and is in no way dependent upon our powers of conceptualization.
Chapter 4: The Levels of Selfhood As without, so within - the basic premise of the traditional outlook (and of this book) is that man and the cosmos have a similar shape.
Chapter 4: The Levels of Selfhood I. Body (Terrestrial) • A. A body made of cells equipped with hundreds or thousands of molecules a million billion times finer than the most delicate cybernetic relays man can devise • B. Its apex the brain, the most highly organized three pounds of matter we know
Chapter 4: The Levels of Selfhood II. Mind (Intermediate) • A. Brain is a part of the body, but mind and brain are not identical (brain breathes mind like lungs breathe air). Mind's existence is proved in three ways • 1. Evidence from neurophysiologists: • a. There is no brain-spot which, if electrically stimulated, will induce patients to believe or to decide • b. Only the human brain is divided into two hemispheres - The left deals with logic, the right grasps intuitively and able to deal with transverbal super- terrestrial planes • 2. The theoretical argument that no convincing materialistic explanation of mind has been forthcoming • 3. The empirical argument that mind is a distinctive kind of entity, conforming to laws that differ in kind from those that matter exemplifies. (parapsychology such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psycho kinesis) • B. We experience mind operating in four forms. • 1. Waking, it causes us to view the world as if through a window rather than as a slide show presentation of our senses. • 2. When we sleep - Research shows in dreams we are close to the center of life's vitalities. • 3. Daydreams • 4. The reports of life after death experiences and the subject of spiritualism is treacherous but not to be completely rejected.
Chapter 4: The Levels of Selfhood III. Soul (Celestial) • A. The soul is sensed first in our discernment of our individuality. • 1. The soul is the final locus of our individuality. • 2. Mind is the stream of consciousness - soul is the source of this stream; it also witnesses the stream while never itself appearing within the stream. • 3. It underlies all the changes through which an individual passes and thereby provides the sense in which these changes can be considered to be his. • 4. We sense it in the sense of what it feels like to be oneself instead of anyone else who has ever lived. • B. The soul is sensed second in our discernment of our wants; we are creatures of wants. • 1. Man seems always to be searching for an object that he could love, serve and adore wholeheartedly. • 2. Our entire history - political, moral, legal socio-cultural, intellectual, economic and religious from earliest times to the present day is the record of that search. • 3. The search is for the Good but because the soul is finite, it appears to the soul as if its fulfillment were to be found in finite things: wealth, fame, power, a loved one, whatever. • 4. Some individual souls get no further than to love the finite things. • 5. Some individual souls reach the point of focusing their love on the Good through worship of an anthropomorphic form of God, the creator of the finite things. • 6. An exceptional type of soul can slough off his own image and know an infinite God otherwise than through a human prototype. If an in-ways-humanized image serves as a bridge to a region beyond the limitations under which all images must labor, then praise God. • C. This exceptional type of soul completes its encounter with the infinite God in three steps. • 1. First, the accent falls on the love the soul feels for God. • 2. Second, the accent falls on God's love for man. • 3. In the final step the soul relinquishes its individuality entirely, simply dissolving into the Godhead (Spirit). The soul perceives that the love it directs toward God is none other than that which originated in God's love for it.
Chapter 4: The Levels of Selfhood IV. Spirit (The Infinite) • A. If soul is the element in man that relates to God, Spirit is the element that is identical with Him - not with his personal mode, for on the celestial plane God and soul remain distinct, but with God's mode that is infinite. • B. It is that "something" in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable. • C. Spirit is infinite, but man is finite because he is not Spirit only. He is body, mind, and soul which veils the Spirit within him and prevents him from being omnipotent or omniscient and limits him from perfect goodness. • D. But his Spirit does give him vantage point from which he can see that his station requires the limitations his humanity imposes. • E. Man accepts that decree for his physical component; for his mind and soul as well, in their respective ways. Meanwhile his Spirit remains free, it being the sovereign that imposes the decree rather than the prisoner who submits to it. • D. The shifting of the ballast of man's self-recognition from servant to Sovereign proceeds by stages. • 1. Almost invariably there is some point (in one's life) where selfhood is sensed to end and the not-self begin. We recognize we are the sum total of all that we do and all that happens to us, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. • a. It can appear as a predominantly hostile world of alien objects and circumstances that kick and buffet, • b. or as everlasting arms from whose embrace it is impossible to fall. • 2. One must come to the point where they are seen as the latter (the door of love); that is love of Being-as-a-whole or of the God who is its Lord before one can take the final step in self-abandonment and identify with one's surround. Or, as stated above (at III. C. 3.): In the final step the soul relinquishes its individuality entirely, simply dissolving into the Godhead (Spirit). The soul perceives that even the love it directs toward God is none other than that which originated in God's love for it.
Chapter 5:The Place of Science • Science, man's brightest intellectual exploit may house meaning beyond those it wears on its sleeve. These meanings as they bear on the human spirit show themselves in a series of parallels between science and religion.
Chapter 5:The Place of Science • The modern West is the first society to view the physical world as a closed system. Our objection to regarding the physical world as a closed system is not that the view is unfortunate but that it is untrue. The question for us here is not, Does science require transphysical domains? but rather, Does it hint of their existence? Clues are not proofs, of course, but they are something, and to follow their lead is the present chapter's object. Science, man's brightest intellectual exploit may house meaning beyond those it wears on its sleeve. These meanings as they bear on the human spirit show themselves in a series of parallels between science and religion. Both claim that:
Chapter 5:The Place of Science I. Things are not as they seem. • A. Science: • Modern science has unmasked the claims of man's sense receptors to disclose the world as it actually is. Had they presented us with the way things are we could not have survived. If we perceived atoms or quanta instead of cars we would be run over. Had our ancestors seen electrons instead of bears they would have been eaten. • B. Religion: • No more than man's unaided senses disclose the nature of the physical universe do his standard sensibilities discern the world's import: the meaning of life, history, or existence in general. World religions teach us these meaning whereas our hearts disregard event that lie outside their own self-interest.
Chapter 5:The Place of Science II. The other-than-the-seeming is a "more": indeed, a stupendous more. It outstrips anything everyday experience might suspect. • A. Science: • 1. The galaxies in the universe number in the billions. Their distances from us measure in the million and billions of light years. • 2.In the opposite direction, the molecules in a half ounce of water is roughly 600,000 billion billion. B. Religion: When world religions use numbers to suggest qualitative degrees it gives the astronomers a run for their money but generally will not bother with such number games but move right to the word infinite.
Chapter 5:The Place of Science III. In their further reaches the world's "Mores" cannot be known in ordinary ways. • A. Science: • When the physicist comes upon the very large, the very fast, or the very small nature violates, disregards, transcends the categories of space and time as we intuit them. For example, light is found to be both a wave and a particle. • B. Religion: • The more we try to comprehend Perfection or even the heavens pictorially, the more credibility drains out of them, leaving us with cardboard cutouts of pearly gates and streets of gold or of thousand-armed divinities. Notwithstanding the infinite difference between God and man, Christ is fully both.
Chapter 5:The Place of Science IV. The "Mores" that cannot be known in ordinary ways do, however, admit of being known in ways that are exceptional. • A. Science: • The device for discerning matter's farther reaches is mathematics. Nature can no longer be consistently imaged or described in ordinary language, but it can be consistently conceived through equations. • B. Religion: • The comparably specialized way of knowing reality's highest transcorporeal reaches is the mystic vision. For example Buddha beneath the bo tree, Saul on the road to Damascus. The message is always the same. We find that it consists of four components: • 1.The insight is ineffable. Emphatically it knows, but like higher mathematics, what it knows is so little contiguous with ordinary knowing that scarcely a hint of it can be conveyed to the uninitiated; it is incommunicable. • 2. The vision shows existence to be characterized by an entirely unexpected unity: earth joined to heaven, man fused with God, The Lord is one. (Another striking parallel with science: time and space are one, space and gravity are one) • 3. The discovery naturally awakens joy. • 4. But the joy is not a mere feeling. The man of God is never rejoiced; he is joy itself. The mystic vision is not a feeling: it is a seeing, a knowing that involves being. The insights are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance; they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.
Chapter 5:The Place of Science V. The distinctive ways of knowing which the exceptional regions of reality require must be cultivated. • A. Science: • It takes time to become a physicist today. When asked how he discovered the composition of the radiation emitted by radioactive substances Rutherford replied, "I don't think I thought about another thing for seven years." • B. Religion: • It would seem that mystic knowing does not presuppose this kind of discipline and training. However, we must distinguish on the religious side between individuals who experience flashes of insight and others who stabilize these flashes and turn them into abiding light. Memory of the experience must be operative rather than idle, become his defining sense of reality, takes command and has the "curious sense of authority for aftertime.
Chapter 5:The Place of Science VI. Profound knowing requires instruments. • A. Science: • No amount of theorizing, however ingenious, could ever tell us as much about the galactic and extragalactic nebulae as can direct acquaintance by means of a good telescope, camera, and spectroscope. • B. Religion: • The mystic counterparts of such instruments are basically two: • 1. For collectives - tribes, societies, civilizations, traditions - the revealing instruments are the Revealed Texts or in non-literate societies, the ordering myths that are impounded in stories. • 2. Other more individual instruments are required as well. Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.
Chapter 5:The Place of Science VII. Both science religion come to a highest strata, a final riser leading upward into a nothingness out of which all matter is created. It is a far cry from antimatter and super-space to the mind of an aborigine, yet it is conceivable that if the whole sweep of science were to be spread before the latter he might see it in better perspective than we do.
Chapter 6: Hope, Yes; Progress, No Our true hope lies not in the illusion of collective progress of life here on the terrestrial plane but in an individual upward journey of soul and spirit to join the Infinite Creator of us all.
Chapter 6:Hope, Yes; Progress, No I. Situated as we are in the Middle World, hard times and depression are a part of the human lot and hope is our prime recourse.
Chapter 6:Hope, Yes; Progress, No II. In the primordial outlook hope is vertical, that is the fundamental change that is hoped for is an ascent of the individual soul through a medium - the world - which does not itself change substantially but provides stable rungs on which the soul can climb.
Chapter 6:Hope, Yes; Progress, No III. The imagery of the modern version of hope is horizontal, that is a hope that human life as a whole can be improved. The change in the view of hope was caused by three agents in the following order: • A. Science - Around the seventeenth century the scientific method began garnering information at an exponential rate. It seemed evident that progress for the human race was being made. • B. Technology - It multiplied goods, relieved drudgery, and counteracted disease. It again it looked as if mankind as a whole was advancing. • C. Scientism - Its assumptions are that corporeal reality is the only concrete and self-sufficient reality there is; there are no upper stories and therefore hope has nowhere to go but forward (horizontally) in this physical world; that progress is being made (proved mainly in biology by Darwinism and evolution).
Chapter 6:Hope, Yes; Progress, No IV. The last major point of this book is that the modern view of progress is an illusion; not only future progress but past progress as well. Utopia is a dream, evolution a myth. • A. The outlook for the future: • 1. Long-range the prospects for our universe are collapsing into a widening black hole or winding down to an entropic deep freeze four degrees above absolute zero. • 2. Short range the prospects are ecological crisis, energy depletion, population explosion and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The short-range future, too, looks bleak. • B. Lack of encouragement from past progress up to the present: • 1.The short-range past: The view that our species begins with ape men and moves through primitive savages to culminate in the intelligent creatures we have now become proves to be false. • a. The Neanderthal's brain was larger than ours. • b. "The savage mind" is fully as complex and rational as our own. • c. The use that we now put our mind to (analytical thought) seems to have violence built into it. • 2. Extending our retrospective look past man to the story of life as a whole, we come evolution in its classic, Darwinian sense. This is the key domain, for it is on biological evolution that the "prevolution" ( the illusion of progress) finally builds. • a. The rise of man can be accounted for only by other principles than those known today to physics and chemistry. • b. Evolution can be understood only as a feat of emergence, an epitome of an alternative to Darwinism. • c. Emergence denies that a stream can rise higher than its source in the sense of simpler ordering principle accounting for ones that are more complex. The primordial outlook agrees with this denial and adds that something cannot come from nothing. The point of this book is to tip the lever back to this earlier, more natural view.
Chapter 6:Hope, Yes; Progress, No V. Far from denying life's progression, tradition provides a reason for it. The origin of species is metaphysical. • A. Earth mirrors heaven. But mirrors invert. The consequence here is that that which is first in the ontological order appears last in the temporal order. • B. In the celestial realm the species are never absent; their essential forms or archetypes reside there from an endless beginning. • C. As earth ripens to receive them, each in its turn drops to the terrestrial plane and, donning the world's fabric, gives rise to a new life form.
Chapter 6:Hope, Yes; Progress, No VI. Our true hope lies not in the illusion of collective progress of life here on the terrestrial plane but in an individual upward journey of soul and spirit to join the Infinite Creator of us all. • A. Body dies, but the soul and spirit that animate it live on. • B. At death man is ushered into the unimaginable expanse of a reality no longer fragmentary but total. • C. Its all-revealing light shows up his earthly career for what it truly was, and the revelation comes first as judgment. The pretenses, rationalizations and delusions that structured and warped his days are now glaringly evident. And because the self is now identified with its Mind of vital center rather than its Body, Minds larger norms to which the embodied ego paid little more than lip service, now hold the balance. • D. It is thus that in hell man condemns himself, his own members rise up to accuse him. Once the self is extracted from the realm of lies, the falsities by which it armored itself within that realm become like flames. • E. When the flames have consumed these falsities - or to use other language, when truth has set the distortions of terrestrial existence in perspective - The balance is restored and the distortions too, are seen to have had their place. This is forgiveness. With it, the Mind recedes as the Body earlier did at death, and the self, which is to say attention and identification, passes to the Soul's immortal center, which is now freed for the beatific vision. • F. Lost in continual adoration and wonder, it abides in the direct presence of the Living God who is Being Itself. • G. Beyond this, where the film that separates knower from known is itself removed and the self sinks into the Spirit that is Infinite...Ah, but we can say no more. We have reached the Cloud of Unknowing, where the rest is Silence.
Chapter 7: Epilogue Is there anything respecting our thesis that has not been said and needs to be said? Perhaps some misunderstanding can be anticipated and allayed.
Chapter 7: Epilogue • I. It is a mistake to assume that the traditions teach that earlier is in every way better and the present without redeeming prospect of any sort. Bygone days really are gone and many specifics of "the good old days" would not be good in our context.
Chapter 7: Epilogue • II. To charge the primordial perspective with social indifference is calumny. In this area the issue is simply that of balance and proportion. Infinite matters being accorded infinite regard and finite ones being regarded conditionally.
Chapter 7: Epilogue • III. A possible misunderstanding of the primordial outlook: namely, that the view is pessimistic. The primordial tradition hold that man - not man in some hypothetically envisioned future, but man as he is constituted today and has always been constituted - is heir to Infinite Being, Infinite Awareness, Infinite Bliss. It is impossible in principle for any alternative, ancient or modern, to match that claim.
Appendix:The Psychedelic Evidence There is reason to question whether it is wise to even mention the psychedelics in connection with God and the Infinite. The goal, it cannot be stressed too often, is not religious experiences: it is the religious life. And with respect to the latter, psychedelic "theophanies" can abort a quest as readily as, perhaps more readily than, they can further it. It is the potential for the drug LSD as a resource for enlarging our understanding of the human mind and self that concerns us in this book. The view of man that was outlined in Chapter 4 presented him as a multilayered creature and work with LSD points to the same conclusion.
Appendix: The Psychedelic Evidence I. Description of the three stages LSD experiences • A. The first stages of its use provide experiences of a distinctly personal character. • B. In the second stage the theme of death and rebirth frequently recurred and was characterized by an absence of the individually and biographically determined material. • C. Two features define the third stage of use: • 1.Profound religious and mystical experiences • 2. Transpersonal experiences; ones occupied with things other than oneself. They are cosmic, having to do with the elements and forces from which life proceeds. The subject is less conscious of himself as separate from what he perceives. To a large extent the subject-object dichotomy is itself transcended.
Appendix: The Psychedelic Evidence II. Interpretation and explanation. • A. The three stages as explained by psychiatry in terms of the life history of the individual • 1. First stage experiences result from the individual's infancy and childhood experiences. • 2. Second stage experiences result from experiences attending birth; an experience common to us all. • 3. The Third stage taps the earliest memories of all: before the womb grew crowded , when the fetus blended with its mother in mystic embrace.
Appendix: The Psychedelic Evidence II. Interpretation and explanation. • B. The three stages as explained by the common vision of the world religions: The self is composed of body, mind, soul and spirit. LSD is a seeing-eye probe that penetrates progressively toward the core of the subject's being. • 1. In the first stage the events that were most important in the subject's formation are the ones that rush forward for attention. • 2.In the second stage chemicals enter the region of the mind that outdistances the brain and swims in the medium of the psychic or intermediate plane with the following consequences: • a. Biographical data - events that imprinted themselves on the subject's body, in this case the memory region of his brain - recede. • b. Their place is taken by the "existentials" of human existence in general. • c. In the death and rebirth experience that climaxes this phase, the self has entered the intermediate plane through the soul's assumption of - compression into - mind. Mind must be dissolved (die) for the soul to be released (reborn) • 3. In this third stage, the sense of release from the imprisoning structures of mind signals the fact that the probe has reached the level of soul. The phenomenological consequences being: • a. The experience is now beatific, identification with the universe, cosmic consciousness, the intuitive insight into the essence of being, the approximation to God. • b. The experience maybe abstract: blinding light or beautiful colors or associated with space or sound. Or if more concrete tends to be archetypal, with the archetypes seeming to be limitless in number. The soul level is the plane of God and the archetypes. • c. The God who is encountered is single and so far removed from anthropomorphism as to elicit the pronoun "it". This is in contrast to the gods of the second stage which tend to be multiple, Olympian, and essentially titans.
Appendix: The Psychedelic Evidence Beyond the soul lies only Spirit, an essence so ineffable that when the seeing eye strikes it, virtually all that can be reported is that it is "beyond" and "more than" all that had been encountered theretofore.
Appendix: The Psychedelic Evidence The idea that the "three-dimensional world" is only one of many experiential worlds created by the Universal Mind appears much more logical than the opposite alternative that is so frequently taken for granted, namely that the material world has objective reality of its own and that the human consciousness and the concept of God are merely products if highly organized matter, the human brain. When closely analyzed the latter concept presents at least as many incongruences, paradoxes and absurdities as the described concept of the Universal Mind. The problems of finity versus infinity of time and space: the enigma of the origin of matter, energy and space; and the mystery of the prime impulse appear to be so overwhelming and defeating that one seriously questions why this approach should be given priority in our thinking.
