Huston Smith (1919-2016): Psychology of Religious Experience, Thinking Allowed w/ Jeffrey Mishlove

[Music] thinking aloud conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove [Music] hello and welcome our topic this evening is the psychology of religious experience and my guest tonight is one of America's great scholars of religious traditions dr. Houston Smith dr. Smith is a former professor of religion and psychology at MIT he's the author of the great classic the religions of man which has sold over 2 million copies as well as six other books on psychology religion and philosophy most recently one called beyond the postmodern mind welcome dr. Smith thank you it's a pleasure to have you here your background in religious studies and philosophy and psychology is very extensive and the topic that we're going to discuss is is so very broad in some ways there are so many religions and they are so diverse and yet ultimately they all seem to reflect the mind of man would you say that as a scholar of religion you've become a more religious person yourself I certainly don't feel that I've become less religious and I also feel that these studies have deepened and broadened my what my beliefs and in that sense I guess one might say more religious I think I might say prefer to say perhaps a little more maturely religious because I didn't have a strong religious bent from my adolescence on its I suppose always a little delicate for a scholar who is supposed to be objective to study something as intense and passionate as religion can be well some see it as a problem but I've been fortunate that it's never been a conflict for me because it seems to me that the opposite would be very difficult that if there was if you are studying something you were not really in love with or you felt that it could not bear the light of careful analysis and added information now that would be a real tension a real conflict but it's been one of my blessings I think that I've been able to spend my professional life working on precisely what concerns me most my first encounter and in a personal or a deep way with the psychology a religious experience came from of course reading William James classic wonderful book in which he described his experiments with nitrous oxide and other drugs at the time and also a courageous and adventuresome mind also in the mid-60s reading a book by Timothy Leary and Ralph Messner called the the psychedelic experience in which they attempted to create the analogy between the the pantheon of gods and the Hindu and Buddhist traditions with the dynamic forces working in the subconscious mind yes well that was a very interesting and indeed important which I say happening of our time because this correlation and connection it's it's a very delicate one as we all know but between artificially induced paranormal experiences and ones that come naturally they have a can have and do at times have a great deal in common overlap them a huge overlap and the discovery of these substances actually a rediscovery because knowledge of them goes back at least 3,000 years and perhaps is much further than that but the fact that we now know how they work on the brain has opened this up as a field of study which it had not been before you were involved in some of the early I was right at the eye of the cyclone that was 1960 and I was teaching at MIT and I had arranged to have Aldous Huxley come on an endowed program which enabled luminaries in the humanities to come to MIT so I was his host for the fall of 1960 at MIT and of course he had written written the book of the doors of perception which was one of the opening books in this area describing his experiences with mescaline and well it just happened that that September when Aldous Huxley arrived at MIT was the exact month that Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard from Berkeley yes and on the way as you know the story it's part of history now on his way he took a vacation swing down in New Mexico and on the edge of a swimming pool one afternoon ingested what seven mushrooms which opened up his mind in ways that totally startled took him by surprise and psilocybin mushrooms I presume that's right that's right and he had arrived at Harvard with a blank check he was a a research professor had accepted an appointment as research professor in the Center for Personality study and he could pick his subject whatever he wanted to work on and the moment he had that experience he was of course absolutely fascinated and mystified by how mushrooms could cause that kind of impact upon his mind but he didn't know what to do with it and but he had read Huxley's book and so I actually had a part in getting the two of them together and it's true for that fall the three of us were very much in the ring in this matter and this was at a time of course when these drugs were perfectly legal not only legal but this was respectable it was research at Harvard University and one of the first things that they did was to Leary did was to mount an open study which in which people would simply report their experiences but he found so many of those experience had a mystical cast to them that he began reaching out for someone who might know something about mysticism yes and that's where he tapped me and involved me in the project you had been studying mysticism long before this I presume that's true had you thought about the relationship between mysticism and drugs prior to your encounters with Leary and Huxley well only academically in that I had read descriptions also Huxley's in the doors of perception and as he points out their phenomenon phenomenologically which is to say descriptively if you match descriptions of the experi they are indistinguishable I had actually I actually conducted an experiment on that in which I took snippets or paragraphs from classic mystical experiences and then descriptions of experiences under the psychedelics which were mystical of course not also the experiences on instruction have that curve but those that did and then shuffle them up and gave them to people who were knowledge about mysticism and asked them to see it to sort them and what they which came from the real mystics and which came from the drug users exactly and they could not the there was no reliability in their prediction that sounds similar to a more recent piece of work I know Lawrence LeSean did where he took the statements of mystics and statements of physicists right and compared them and they seemed almost indistinguishable as as well I'd like to add one other thing so phenomenologically which again means simply descriptively one cannot tell the difference but i think i would want to say that that's not the only dimension because religion is not simply an experience religion is a way of life and experiences come and go but quality of life is what religion is concerned with so one has to ask also not only do they feel the same but is their impact on the light of saying well I think especially now that we can look back after 20 years and from the original psychedelic experiments of that type and you can see distinct differences between psychedelic cults and and real deep religious traditions so I think it's important that having touched on this subject we not leave the impression that the two are identical in every respect simply descriptively they are indistinguishable what about the original insight that Leary seemed to have in the psychedelic experience that the gods really do exist within us and I think what he was saying in effect is that the pantheon of gods from the ancient pantheistic religions are real active forces even of a paranormal variety within our own rings yeah and if we're Jews or Christians yes well that's another very interesting development in our time that in the religions of the West up to this point divine forces have been imaged externally from the soul but one man comes to think of it when one talks about things of the Spirit geography falls away because the spirit is not bound by space and time and therefore the distinction between out there and in here which in our everyday life is very important but once one as I say modulates to matters of the Spirit this whole framework of space and time and matter so it drops away and what we are now coming to see that this talk about out there has a certain naturalness but also certain limitation and one can just as easily turn the tables and talk about the divine within if I can put it one other way when one looks out upon the world value terms that is what is good is imaged as up there yes the gods are heaven and the gods are on the mountaintops and angels always sing on high they don't sing out of the depths of bowels of the earth but when we introspect and by the way that imagery is natural because Sun and rain come from on high too but when we turn our attention inward and introspect then we reach for the other kind of imagery of depth you know we talk about profound and deep thought all this is leading up to the fact that in point of fact this distinction between out there and in here is artificial and only metaphorical when we're talking about things of the Spirit yes and now I think people in our time this is one that changes that having worked in imagery of the divine being out there now there is a move towards realizing or exploring ways in which the same reality can be discovered within oneself there another related notion I think is the one originally developed by the sociologist Durkheim the French sociologist in which he suggests that religions are really representations of the group mind of a society and that the god of each culture is an embodiment of the what he called the group mind and he almost described that in ways that seemed quite paranormal to me when you begin talking of a group mind something like a Jungian collective unconscious well again I think there's it's very useful for one thing we are too much given to the notion that the mind is simply attached to the brain and therefore because the brain has a given geographical locus then the mind must - but I remember an hour weekend conference down in Tucson a few years ago with Gregory Bateson he posed to the psychologist Rollo Mae and Oh who's the Carl Rogers all those people were there he said where is your mind and it sort of took everyone I'm back but what he was leading up to is it's quite wrong to think of the mind as lodged inside this skin encapsulated ego as Alan Watts used to call it that the mind reaches out as far as one's environment extends in Bateson's notion and of course we can always go back to the arguments of Bishop Berkeley that the entire physical universe and everything we experience your TV sets for example exist only in your mind right there's no other way to identify them and we talked about ecology of nature now but an ecology of mind we're just beginning to get used to that idea and yet it's an experience one can walk into the room now in current terminology feel vibrations you know that you can sometimes feel like a wall of anger or hostility but one can also sense an ambience of peace and now that the physicists are realizing that physical phenomena really float on networks and webs of relationships so the mind we're only now coming to see that our minds to derive their they sort of factor out and congeal out of a psychic medium that Durkheim I think was quite right and identified you know I noticed though in contemporary religions particularly amongst the the evangelistic Christians who are experiencing such a revival they're very concerned about certain errors that people fall into the you know the notion that one might identify oneself with God you know in an egotistical way you know how do you feel about that well I think they've got a point I mean if someone comes along and says I am God it's perfectly reasonable to ask well your behavior doesn't exactly exemplify that fact God by definition is perfect and what human being can make that claim so I think the the ministers that you refer to have a good point but it doesn't annul the concept of the divine within which remains valid the distinction can come even if we think of the divine within as Hinduism puts it and they have been perhaps the most explicit of all the great tradition in saying that ultimately in the final analysis the analysis in their terminology up mom is mom up mom is the God within and broth mom is the God without but then they deal with the point you were raising by saying well they're a lantern may have light functioning light within it but it may be coated not only with dust and soot but in egregious cases with mud to the point where that line of that light does not shine through at all so it's both things are true but both need to be said in the same breath namely I believe that it is true that in the final analysis we are divine in our God but we should immediately acknowledge how Kate and coated we are with dross that conceals that divinity and it's ones tempted to say an endless quest to clean the surface to let the light shine through we were discussing earlier in the program some of your experiences with some of the very primitive peoples such as the Aborigines in Australia and they're in there I suppose naive native religions having a real sense of contact with this level of reality well they do in two ways Australian Aborigines one is that they distinguish between our everyday experience and what they call the dreaming and the dreaming is another level of experience in which they participate in the life of their ancestors and indeed the creation of the world and I suppose we might call it a trance-like state but they that doesn't quite do it because even in the midst of their ordinary life why half of their mind you might say is still on or in this dreaming state but then there's another way in which they're in touch with it and this has to do with parapsychology as we know the word a terrible thing whose pacifically while I was in Australia basically giving a series of lectures that all the universities there but using my spare time to come in touch with the aborigine and so I sought out at every University the anthropologists who introduced me and put me in touch with him and I did not in that entire swing meet an anthropologist who was not convinced that the Aborigines had telepathic powers hmm and they'd simply told me story after story when they would be with them and then suddenly one of the persons say I must go back to the tribe so-and-so has died and they go back it's a strong statement coming from anthropologists who tend to be quite skeptical right there their theory was that insofar as they had a theory about the presumption was that these are normal human powers but like any power it can atrophy unused and also can be short-circuited if our conceptual mind doubts that it is real so would you say there are some religious traditions that encourage this the development and the cultivation of the psychic side of human beings more than others well it's interesting I don't put it the other way slightly differently and that is to say that most of them believe that these powers are there that they do increase as spiritual advancement occurs however they also warn against it hmm and say if you make this the goal why you're settling for too little and also there are some dangers in for one thing this is a kind of treacherous water where one has to not totally benign but also there is a strong temptation as these cities as the Indians call ours yes the powers become available to you why people's heads get turned and they've become egotistic in their abilities and so in that same way it can be counter productive to the spiritual quest so the greatest teachers are quite unanimous in saying they come but pay no attention to them but aren't there traditions the shamanistic tradition the tantric tradition which really do emphasize these powers yes that is certainly so now I guess I tipped my hand a little bit in its in excluding them from the most profound spiritual master perhaps you do have some preferences well shamanism is is immensely it's fascinating and extremely important in the history of religion but sanctity one does not associate with shaman they have immense power and they and it can be used misused as well as used I think on balance it's been used so I value them but they're neither what should I say Saints nor philosophers perhaps we might liken psychic abilities in this sense to musical ability or any other natural talent that could be used in in different ways and some religions cultivate music I suppose more than others that's right most most shamans are very much linked with the people and helping them with practical problems of life but the aspect of religion that has to do with virtues and compassion and loving kindness now this kind of thing is when I speak of profundity yes getting into those waters the shaman are that's not their fort they have a different role well as our program is beginning to wind up I wonder if you could comment on two things one is a little bit more on you know how your exploration of religions has affected you personally and perhaps we can tie it to our viewing audience a little bit is there some message that you would have for those people who would be viewing us right now in terms of what what your studies might convey to them you know well like any term it can be defined religion can be defined as one wishes and if one links it to institutions I think religious institutions are indispensable but they're clearly a mixed bag and we've had the wars religion but I tend to think this is the nature of institutions and people in the aggregate what government has a clean or perfect record you know one running out of time now I'm gonna have to come in one center but I think if one takes a basic religious worldview this is in not only important but it's true and we need and need to in spite of the problem ears open to those truths dr. Smith it's been a real pleasure having you with me today thank you very much and thank you very much for being with us [Music] you

Channel: ThinkingAllowedTV

Views: 16,764

Rating: 4.9671235 out of 5

Keywords: psychology, transpersonal psychology, religion

Id: nsh61czccv4

Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2017