Transcript Forgotten Truth - The Common Vision of the World's

Forgotten Truth - The Common Vision of the World's
Religions
By Huston Smith
(Outline Prepared by George Klimowicz)
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Preface
The thesis of this book is that how things
looked to people everywhere until modern
science threw the West temporarily offbalance has helpful things to suggest
toward the creation of a viable pattern
for our time.
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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.

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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.
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Chapter 1:The Way Things Are

I. The modern, scientific, or secular
view of reality
A. Hierarchical: Macro-world, mesoworld, and micro-world
B. Gauged by quantity: space, size
and strength of forces all described
precisely by numbers

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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
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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
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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
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Chapter 2: Symbolism of Space: The ThreeDimensional Cross
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Chapter 2: Symbolism of Space: The
Three-Dimensional Cross
 A three-dimensional cross is the
most adequate model of reality that
space can provide
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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"
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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
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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.
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Chapter 3:The Levels of Reality
I. The Terrestrial Plane (The gross,
the material, the sensible, the
corporeal, the phenomenal, or the
human plane)
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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
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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
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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.
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Chapter 4: The Levels of Selfhood
III. Soul (Celestial)

A. The soul is sensed first in our discernment of our individuality.
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B. The soul is sensed second in our discernment of our wants; we are creatures of wants.
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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.
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.

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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.
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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.

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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 Beingas-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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 29
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and turn them into abiding light. Memory of the
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 nonliterate 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.
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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 superspace 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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:
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
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.
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