Dana Sawyer on Huston Smith Interview

Summary

Dana Sawyer discusses Huston Smith’s defense of mystical experience and the limits of strict materialism. The conversation explores how intellectual inquiry, religious traditions, spiritual practice, and the longing for transcendence can work together.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can intellectual study support spiritual awakening, or does it become an obstacle?
• What are the limits of scientific materialism in understanding consciousness and mystical experience?
• How can religious rituals and traditions help spiritual seekers without becoming rigid or exclusive?
• Why do people long for transcendent experience in a materialistic culture?

Key takeaways

• Mystical experience deserves serious consideration even when it cannot be fully measured.
• Intellectual insight can sometimes open into profound spiritual experience.
• Concepts and philosophies are useful pointers, but direct experience remains primary.
• Religious traditions can provide community, identity, and established paths of practice.
• Dogmatism is the problem in religion and secular ideology alike.
• Religions can be revitalized by recovering their transcendent purpose.
• Material consumption cannot satisfy the deeper human longing for transcendence.

Transcript

Introducing Dana Sawyer and Huston Smith

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. If this is the first one you’ve seen, you might want to go to batgap.com, where you’ll find several hundred other interviews, all archived and categorized in various ways. There’s a bunch of other things to explore on the website.

I always mention at the beginning, the way NPR does, that this show is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners. So, if you feel moved to do so, there’s a donate button on the site.

My guest today is Dana Sawyer. I had Dana on the show about five years ago, when I was more or less first getting started with it. I just listened to that interview the other day, and I thought it was a good one, if I do say so myself. We had a lively conversation.

Dana has also been part of some other things we’ve done. He was part of an interview with Jeffrey Kripal, which you can find on the site, and he was a participant in the group conversation we had at Sophia University last October. You’ll find that on the site as well.

Dana is a professor of religion and philosophy at the Maine College of Art and a lecturer on world religions for the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine. He has both academic expertise and experience in Hindu and Buddhist systems of philosophy, and has an interest in the appeal of Asian religions for the Western mind.

He has written a critically acclaimed biography of Aldous Huxley, along with the book we’re about to talk about today, which is a biography of Huston Smith. Dana is his authorized biographer, and he lectures widely on the perennial philosophy.

He lives in Portland, Maine, with his artist wife, Stephanie, and travels regularly to India. He’s been there quite a few times. As a matter of fact, he’s going there in December. If anyone would like to go with him, it’s possible to join in on the little tour that he’s leading of Benares, Rishikesh, and places like that in India.

Dana and I have been good friends for 45 years. We first met in about 1971, when I was 21 and he was 19. I came to his college in Connecticut teaching Transcendental Meditation, which he learned. So, here we are.

Dana: Again.

Rick: Again. Actually, Dana and I did this interview out at the SAND conference in October, but I’m glad we’re doing it again. We had to do it again because the audio didn’t work for some reason. We didn’t know that at the time, but we didn’t get Dana’s side of the conversation. Also, we were pressed for time. We only had an hour, and today we’re probably going to end up going two hours, like we usually do.

People might ask, “Why is it? There are so many people out there these days who say that they have awakened. Some of them even use the word ‘enlightenment.’ They have realized their true nature. They’ve had some kind of nondual realization. Many people say that it’s an abiding awakening, that it doesn’t come and go anymore. They know who they are.

Many of those turn around and say to others, “Give up the search. You are that. This is all there is. You don’t need to do anything.” And so, one might ask, “Why am I about to interview a guy who doesn’t claim any of that, who has written a biography of another guy who didn’t claim any of that?” So, maybe that’s my first question for you, Dana.

Dana: Well, is that a question? Is that the question you’re asking?

Rick: It kind of is, yeah. I mean, why are we having this conversation?

Dana: I was going to thank you for inviting me on your program, but now you’re asking me to justify my existence.

Rick: People might say, “Well, who is Huston Smith, and what’s the big deal? He didn’t even claim to be enlightened,” and so on and so forth. So, why are we making such a fuss over him? I mean no disrespect to Huston Smith, because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your book, and I know some answers to that question, but I’d like to see what you would say, because I bet you that some people are going to ask that.

Dana: Well, I think the answer is a simple one for both Huston and me, and that is that both of us are academics in the sense that we write work for academic journals and teach at the college level, and have clearly read too many books. We’re trying to defend the nondual experience. We’re trying to legitimate the validity of nondual experience and mystical states of consciousness.

For so long, Western academics were really saying, “There are only three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping, and everything else is just woo-woo and BS and needs to be thrown in the circular file.” Then there are some of us who have had some of those experiences and who want to take them seriously, so I would say that’s really the reason.

Rick: I would also say that you and Huston are not only academics, but you have been experientially motivated all of your lives. You’ve ardently sought the experience of that which you have also attempted to understand and articulate.

Dana: Exactly, exactly.

Rick: So, it’s not a dry academic sort of thing. Some people think—I mean, people say to me, “Stop thinking about it. Stop reading books. All that just keeps you hung up and prevents you, in a way, from settling into the actual experience.” Personally, I don’t find that. What would you answer to those who say that enlightenment or awakening is not an intellectual thing, and you’re just going to tangle yourself up in complications if you keep pursuing it in an intellectual vein?

Dana: I think they mistakenly believe that somebody who has a very rich intellectual life is necessarily only living inside of that intellectual perspective. This past summer, down in Miami, I gave a lecture at a conference on the Myers-Briggs personality types. Some people process their life through their emotions, some people process their life through thinking, some people are extroverted, and some people are introverted.

People whose dominant tendency is to enjoy processing ideas and working through intellectual arguments find it natural. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have other aspects. I have feelings, and I have a spiritual life.

Also, I think that it’s discounting a phenomenon I experience regularly, and I predict a lot of your listeners have experienced it, which is that you’re reading a book—a book of philosophy—and you’re reading about a particular idea, but all of a sudden that idea triggers a moment of profound insight. You have a moment of the sublime where the boundaries of consciousness expand and open, triggered by a particular thought. I think that’s a very common experience for philosophers, actually.

That experiential knowing trumps all other knowing.

Rick: Also, we might add that in the Hindu tradition you have jnanis, Jnana Yoga, and so on. You have towering intellects like Shankara and Sri Aurobindo, who were extremely erudite and deep thinkers, and wrote very complex texts that took a great deal of intellectual clarity and experiential clarity to understand. You have similar things in the Buddhist tradition.

If you respect those traditions, then you probably don’t have a problem with those who are more intellectually inclined following their natural tendency.

Dana: That’s right. If you look at the debate traditions in Tibetan Buddhism, I’m sure you’ve seen those videos of the monks doing the hand slap and arguing fine points of Buddhist philosophy with each other. They’re not denying that there’s an experiential level of knowledge, knowing, and insight. They’re also processing on the level of philosophy.

As you say, the Upanishads—if you read the Upanishads, these were supposedly mostly cognitions of forest monks and gurus who were, you know, Upanishad means “to sit down near,” literally, because these Shramana philosophers in the sixth and fifth centuries BC were coming and sitting down near them in the forest ashrams. A lot of what they had to say was extremely cerebral and philosophical.

Rick: Yeah. Also, just playing off a point you made a minute ago, you said you have feelings. We have various faculties. Intellect is one, heart is another, and body is another. None of these things are mutually exclusive or really in conflict with one another, and there can be a holistic development in which transcendental experience, intellectual clarity, emotional fullness, and all these things can blossom simultaneously.

Dana: Saying that, I’m not denying that there’s such a thing as concept addiction.

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: People can get caught up in their heads and get caught up in their philosophical truths. I think one of the things postmodern philosophy has taught us is that maybe one of the primary values of a new philosophical way of looking at the world is simply that it freed us from the old philosophical way of looking at the world.

We tend to be too dogmatic about any particular system and need some liberation from that. In Tibetan Buddhism, there are four specific philosophical models that are considered authoritative doctrine, and what’s interesting about those four is that they don’t all really agree with each other very well.

On some level, the Tibetan Buddhists are saying, “Yes, these ideas have facility because they are fingers pointing at the moon.” I’m sure you know that analogy, but they’re not the moon.

Huston Smith versus scientism

Rick: The first note I took when I was reading your book to ask you about—actually, I read a bunch of it before the SAND conference and I didn’t take notes, and then, in the last couple of weeks, I started reading it again and started taking notes, so I may have missed some good stuff.

But the first note I took was that ten years at MIT didn’t make a dent in strict materialism in Huston’s attempt to bring science and religion closer together. He fought against what was called “scientism,” which you can define for us for a minute—basically, that only that which science can measure is valid. He was always up against this academic disdain for mysticism and metaphysics.

I bring that point up because we were just talking about whether intellectualism can be a barrier to spiritual experience. I think it can be if it’s pursued exclusively, without respect for and pursuit of that experience. But if one wants to pursue that experience and is going about it in the right way, then, in my opinion, intellectual understanding is an aid and not a handicap.

Dana: I couldn’t say it better. I think that the problem Huston encountered, which is a problem that I still encounter at academic conferences, is dogmatic materialism. There is a dogmatic materialism that we bump into. Dawkins is a good example of that, I think, and Sam Harris is a good example of that today—several other people as well.

That’s what was going on at

MIT: this exclusive focus on quantification. You can’t quantify these experiences perfectly, though neurophysiology is lending strong evidential support. Then the conclusion is, “Okay, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t exist.” Russell said, “What science can’t prove, mankind can’t know,” which is a ridiculous statement if you think about it, because the first thing I would say as a philosopher would be, “Oh, can you scientifically prove that statement?”

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: Okay, how would you go about scientifically proving the statement that only those things which can be scientifically proven to be true are true? You see what I’m saying?

Rick: Yeah, well, it’s arrogant because it assumes that science is the ultimate means of gaining knowledge. Science is a relatively new thing, and who knows what we might have a thousand years from now, or two thousand years from now, or what they might have had a thousand or two thousand years before that that we actually don’t properly understand.

So it’s just sort of this self-important attitude, in my opinion, where we think that we’re the latest, greatest, and that we’re kind of at the pinnacle of human civilization, and that our tools are the only tools that are worthy of respect.

Dana: Exactly, exactly.

Rick: Okay, now let’s keep this—we’ll keep coming back to Huston. I’ve got plenty of notes here that are going to tie into this, but I suppose he would have found a lot of these points we’re making very interesting and very germane to the things that he spent his time on, so it’s not like we’re straying away from him.

Dana: No, not at all. I mean, if you look at Beyond the Postmodern Mind by Huston Smith, you see a lot of his arguments against scientism.

First of all, he was a defender of religion, so people say, “Well, look how dangerous religion is. Look at all the wars that have been fought over religion. Look at what’s happening in Syria today with ISIS.” By the way, I don’t like calling them the Islamic State. I feel like to call them the Islamic State is letting them decide what an Islamic state should be, and the vast majority of Muslims wouldn’t agree with their idea of Islam.

The vast majority of Muslims would see them as heretics, so we should call them the Heretic State or the Loser State. I don’t know. Why let them determine the terms of nomenclature, or whatever you want to call it?

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Dana: I mean, it’s almost—

Rick: Yeah, go ahead.

Dana: Well, anyway, just getting back to my thought, which is to say that religion is dangerous and we need to get rid of religion, Huston Smith pointed out that in the twentieth century, the most dangerous ideologies were Nazi Germany, Mao’s communism, and Stalin’s communism. So those were secular ideologies.

Huston would say, “Okay, dogmatic ideology is the problem, fanatical ideology is the problem, not religion per se.” Huston would admit that religion has made mistakes, but he agreed with Ramakrishna, who once said, “Religion is like a cow: It kicks, but it also gives milk.” That would be his way of looking at it.

Rick: Yeah, there are some interesting things discussed in your book about Huston’s attempts to really reconcile his understanding of religions in their separateness and also their unity with his own experience, which he enlivened through various means—Zen and psychedelics and various other things.

One thing I found particularly interesting was that he caught on to some philosopher—it might have been Schuon in this case—who helped him reconcile this by talking about how people are naturally either esoterics or exoterics. I’m sure that’s a broad generalization, and there’s some crossover and mixture.

But the exoterics, those who have a sort of outward orientation, kind of need the structure, discipline, ritual, rules, and regulations that religions provide. So it’s not like that stuff is necessarily an obstacle to realization; it has a purpose for those who need it.

As I read your book, I got the sense that that was a real “aha” for Huston. But, again, it also helped to contradict people like Huxley, who felt like religion had become so degenerated and corrupt that it was really an obstacle to enlightenment.

Dana: Yeah, yeah. Huxley was definitely not a pro-religion person in any sense of the word. He really did feel that spiritual experiences were legitimate. He was an endorser of the nondual experience; he called it the “unitive experience.”

Huston felt very uncomfortable with that, even though he was a disciple of Huxley and a close friend of his. He agreed with Huxley about this business of a perennial philosophy: that the mystics of the various religious and wisdom traditions tended to break through into a very similar kind of consciousness.

When they would describe it, whether we’re talking about the poetry of Rumi, the philosophy of Shankara, or the writings of the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, we see them saying very, very similar things, even between cultures that could never have known about each other.

So Huxley was putting all of his attention there, whereas Huston was saying, “Okay, there is this esoteric level of religion, but there is also the exoteric level of religion in terms of ritual and custom and the various practices we associate with Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and so forth.”

And two things there—two things. First of all, in the academic study of religion, many people will look at the underlying structures of various religions, such as family structures and how they’re shaped by the ideologies of religion. Social anthropologists would be doing that kind of work, for example.

There are also people who look at the functions of those structures. What are the functions of those structures? In other words, how do people find community and identity, for example, through a religion?

I grew up in Downeast Maine in the Congregational Protestant Church, and I get a very warm and fuzzy feeling when I go home at Christmas, and I’m with my family, and we’re in the church together. So, again, community and identity are important functions of religion, and there are others that we could cover.

Huston felt like, “You’re making a mistake, Aldous, when you say we just need to get rid of the exoteric level of religion.” We shouldn’t be dogmatic about our particular communities and our particular identities, or be exclusive in that regard, but these are valuable functions for people. People derive a tremendous amount of purpose and meaning from those contexts.

When I was writing the Huston Smith book, I was out in California doing some interviews in the Bay Area, and I interviewed Phil Cousineau, who was a close friend of Joseph Campbell and one of his biographers. Great guy, Phil. Hi, Phil, if you heard this interview.

Phil said, “Yeah, you know, Huston got that, and Huxley and Joseph Campbell really didn’t. I mean, they were so far along in their particular progress, spiritually perhaps, that they could be lone scouts and go it alone.”

But he said, “Janis Joplin used to say, ‘I make love to 2,000 people every night, and then I go home alone.’” Cousineau said, “Maybe if she had had more community, she would have lived past 26 or whatever the age was.”

Rick: 27.

Dana: 27.

Rick: Yeah, so she, Hendrix, and Jim Morrison all died at 27.

Dana: Okay, yeah, dangerous age. I have a 27-year-old daughter. I’m going to give her a call this afternoon and tell her how much I love her.

Rick: Just tell her not to do heroin.

Dana: Getting back to Huston’s view, the exoteric level of religion has a lot of value that sociologists can put a premium on and psychologists can put a premium on, whether intellectuals like Huxley—esoterics like Huxley—do or not.

Huston would also say that Huxley was discounting the fact that these are established trails up the spiritual mountain. I know you meditate every day, Rick, and that meditation practice that you do, Transcendental Meditation, is in many ways just old wine in new bottles. As you know, it’s a traditional mantra japa, mantra-repetition practice of the Shankara lineage, and has been around for 11 centuries.

A lot of these practices—Zen meditation and shamatha, a Tibetan Buddhist practice with which I have a lot of experience—aren’t things that we should poo-poo. You can bushwhack your way up the spiritual mountain, but doing some of these traditional practices can be very, very, very efficacious.

Now, what people can do—and if my coffee is making me blab too much, just pipe up here—but what people can do is sacralize the trail. I think we talked about that in our first interview together.

They can confuse a means for an end in itself, so they can say, “Oh, only my religion is a trail up the spiritual mountain. In fact, there isn’t even a mountaintop. I’m making a mountaintop out of my trail,” if you see what I mean.

It’s really about these practices. I’m sacralizing the practices themselves, and that’s a danger because, for obvious reasons, I think it makes us myopic and blind to other possibilities.

Rick: Yeah, well, you and I were both TM teachers, as we know, although others may not know that. One of the ways in which we were indoctrinated in that training was that religions are the somewhat degenerated remnants of the coming to Earth of a great sage or enlightened being, such as Jesus or Buddha, who taught a fresh teaching and enlightened a lot of people in their presence.

But then, as time went on, knowledge crumbled on the hard rocks of ignorance, and things got distorted and diluted, and so on and so forth, until we have what we have today in terms of the various religions.

Maharishi wasn’t saying that we should do away with them all. He was saying that if we can bring in the transcendent, then we’ll restore the original purpose of religions, and we’ll breathe life into existing religions. I don’t know, I could say more—

Dana: That’s what—that’s what—

Rick: But let the coffee take over. Go ahead.

Dana: Yeah, that’s what Huston was very much trying to do: to say, “If we can reclaim the transcendent aspect of religion, then the religions become revitalized.” And that’s a piece that he picked up from Frithjof Schuon, that that should be there.

I think that’s part of what your work is about and my work is about. Very often, I think in our own culture, people are starving for the transcendent. They don’t realize—we’ve talked about this before—but I think on some subliminal level, because the transcendent is there, the human spirit is always longing for it, hoping to complete itself.

I see with my students a lot of times a longing for what I call the transcendent—a longing for something. It’s like there’s a part of them inside that they can intuit is there, but they really don’t have access to it.

When my nieces were reading the Harry Potter books and when they were reading the Twilight series about becoming a vampire, what I see in all of that—and other scholars have talked about it—is a longing for the transcendent.

We don’t want to be a Muggle. We want to go to Hogwarts, and we want to learn to be magical beings. I think that’s what a place like Esalen is, for example: a Hogwarts for adults, a place where people can go and learn how to make contact with that part of themselves that they profoundly long for.

We don’t want to be a Muggle. We want to go to Hogwarts, and we want to learn to be magical beings.

Rick: Yeah, I would go so far as to say that everybody in the world longs for the transcendent, that everything in creation longs for the transcendent—every dog, every mosquito.

There’s this sort of evolutionary trajectory that we’re all following, and I read this someplace in your book. I don’t know who said it, but that any desire of any sort is a sort of stepping-stone to ultimate fulfillment in the divine ground, I think was the phrase used. Go ahead and comment on that, and then I have another question.

Dana: Well, I think, as I say, in our own culture—sorry, I’m just getting over a cold—I’m surprised people haven’t figured out that you’re just not going to be able to keep going to the mall and find fulfillment, that it isn’t going to happen on the next trip. At the same time, I’m not surprised, because if you look at the amount of propaganda for materialism that the average American mind is bombarded with on a regular basis—the ideology of keeping up with the Joneses, the ideology of dollar sign equals sign smiley face: money is going to do it, you’re going to buy your way into some kind of profound happiness—even though we see in the United States that the life-satisfaction index has gone down, even as Americans’ ability to buy has tripled.

Rick: Well, I don’t think—I mean, you live in Maine, right? And you’re right next door to New Hampshire, where they have this serious heroin epidemic, and maybe you’ve got it in Maine too.

Dana: We have it in Maine too.

Rick: Yeah, and so, to take an extreme example, people should realize, of course, that if you shoot heroin into your arm, it’s going to wear off in a few hours, and you’re not going to be any better off. In fact, you’re going to be worse off than you were before you did it. But people do it anyway, because they don’t see any—the quick fix is better than nothing, and they don’t—I’m starting to give reasons for why they do it now. But it’s not uncommon, and that’s an extreme example, for people to live their lives chasing the quick fix in whatever form, because they don’t know anything else that will provide them relief or fulfillment. So I guess—

Dana: Yeah, I mean—

Rick: Maybe temporary relief is better than nothing.

Dana: That’s right. I mean, I think that’s a part of it. I also think it makes a kind of logical sense. If you live in a society that reduces the purposes of human existence, the telos—the goal of human experience—to only physical comfort and pleasure, why not cut to the chase, man? Shoot some physical comfort and pleasure in your arm, I mean. And this is what I’m saying: I think in some ways there’s a kind of logic to it.

People—that’s why you and I are both interested in all this—there is some curative value for our society. As Jung and many others have argued inside the discipline of psychology, people long for self-actualization. And if they don’t have good social structures that cultivate that in them, then they flounder around, they flail around, and I’m seeing a lot of that today.

Rick: Yeah, well, I know I certainly did a lot of floundering and flailing before I found this. A minute ago, we were talking about the fact that religions do have value, at least potentially, and we’ve been talking about how people really long for the transcendent.

But the average person who gets involved and goes to church every Sunday, for instance, hears some nice songs sung, a talk—a lecture, a sermon—some little rituals and things like that. But when I had to do that as a kid, it was like the low point of my week. My mother would drag me to church, and it was totally boring. I had no idea what was going on, and I hated doing it. I would rather be outside playing baseball.

Because I had no concept of any kind of transcendental reality, nothing that I saw—and I also went to a Congregational church—was providing it. So I guess the question is: If religions have this value, is the exoteric structure of religion sufficient value for the vast majority of people? Or perhaps is the exodus from traditional churches due to the fact that they aren’t providing some kind of transcendent experience? Do they have the means of providing it, or would they have to turn to other sources that have more or less specialized in providing it?

For instance, Thomas Merton went to India, and Father Keating learned TM and then molded it into Centering Prayer, and perhaps found roots for Centering Prayer in Christian tradition. And Huston, of course, tried all kinds of things looking for the transcendent.

So, to summarize that question: Can religions on their own, as they are, pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and provide the deeper experience that people are inherently craving? Or do they need some cross-fertilization from other traditions that have been a little bit clearer about that deeper reality in order to resuscitate themselves?

Dana: Yes.

Rick: Do you want to answer the latter?

Dana: No, that was a whole family of questions. You know, there are so many things to say in there. I mean, Huston was born in 1919 in China into a family of Methodist missionaries, and so he grew up with his only view of foreigners—and he was a foreigner—being that they were profoundly religious people. What came across to Huston was that we’re in good hands, that God loves us, and all of this.

What came through to him from his mother was that he should respect the indigenous religions of China. She was also born and raised in China and could speak fluent Mandarin, as can Huston Smith, so she had a lot of respect for Chinese culture. From childhood, she made sure that her three sons learned how to speak Chinese. So there was a lot of respect.

Rick: Which is more than you can say for a lot of missionaries who go around the world.

Dana: Well, that’s right, that’s right. I mean, his father was definitely old-school: express your Christianity primarily through Christian love. For instance, when his father got to Suzhou, where their mission was, the first thing he built was a hospital, the second thing he built was a school, and the third thing he built was a church. So it shows his priorities in terms of how he expressed his Christianity.

But what I wanted to get to, relative to your family of questions, was that Huston came to believe something that maybe you experienced when you were in church. He respected it tremendously, and he saw some magic happening for his father and for his mother and for one of his brothers, but there was something missing for him.

What he came to theorize was that, as the Bhagavad Gita says, there are basically spiritual personality types. Not everybody is drawn to the path of devotion, bhakti, and that was really his parents’ path. It was about devotion to God, devotion to God in the form of Jesus. It didn’t ring so strongly true for Huston that he realized there were other paths up the spiritual mountain.

Sometimes my students will say that they’re not religious at all, or they’re not spiritual at all, and yet I see them canvassing all the time for the Sierra Club. I will say, “Well, you know, that’s a kind of spirituality. You love nature and believe that nature should be preserved, and so you’re very active in going around and trying to wake people up about global warming and these sorts of things.”

Huston Smith would say that’s karma yoga, as described in the Bhagavad Gita. When we’re in service to humanity and the planet and other beings on it through our actions—Red Cross volunteers in the Third World, for example—that is a spiritual path.

So there are those four major spiritual paths described in the Bhagavad Gita, and Huston would say, “Not every spiritual path is for everybody. Not everybody finds their true home, relative to their own spiritual personality type, in the tradition they were born into.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s one answer to all that family of questions. I think—

Dana: You kind of found that, it sounds like, Rick. I mean, it wasn’t the Congo church, as we used to call it, that really worked for your own self-actualization. That is—

Rick: No. I mean, as soon as I learned to meditate, my attitude was, “Oh, so this is what that whole thing is about. This is what Jesus was talking about, this experience,” you know? Then it began to make more sense, and I began to have more respect for it.

Not that I actually felt like going to church any more than I already had, because I had my own sort of church by meditating. But I didn’t feel the need so much for the outer structure of Christianity, anyway—the Christian outer structure.

Although, as you know, many, many people do go off on a spiritual quest and then come back to Judaism or Christianity or something and integrate that into the tradition they grew up with.

Dana: Right, that’s a very common thing.

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: Very common.

Rick: They become “Hin-jews” or “Bu-jews” or whatever.

Dana: Yeah. Well, those esoteric payoffs of religion—as I say, community, identity, and so forth—are strong attractors for some personality types.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, here in Fairfield, the synagogue is very active, and all these people who have been meditating for many decades are enthusiastic participants in it. It’s a meaningful thing for them.

Dana: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, all right, let’s keep going. I’ve got lots of notes, and you sent me some questions. Feel free to throw in anything at any point that comes to mind that I’m not thinking of that you want to talk about.

The perennial philosophy

Dana: Okay. So I think, just to make sure we’ve covered it, you’ve mentioned it and most people understand it, but it would be worth defining perennial philosophy briefly, because we may refer to it elsewhere in the interview, and it’s a good term for people to understand.

Yeah, well, I mean, it’s simple and straightforward in some ways, but to put it in a historical narrative: in 1937, Aldous Huxley sailed on the Normandy from England to New York. When he was traveling with his wife, he was also traveling with a guy named Gerald Heard, who’s a very interesting figure. It would take a while to really explain Gerald, but he’s in the book.

Gerald was interested in mysticism and got Huxley interested in mysticism. He said, “Hey, we’re going to California. We’re going to drive to California from New York, so we might want to study with a Swami who’s out there, a Swami of the Vedanta Society named Swami Prabhavananda,” and they did that.

When they got to California, they were studying with Swami Prabhavananda. He was teaching them a Hindu meditation practice, and inside of his teaching was this idea of a Sanatana Dharma, an eternal religion: that we live in the world, and implicit in our relationship to the world there is a natural spirituality; that the cosmos has a spiritual dimension, broadly defined; and that we must have a natural relationship to spirituality. So people in all traditions, as they self-actualize and move further into their awakening, wake up into the reality of this singular spiritual tradition.

Anyway, Huxley, having an IQ somewhere north of 200 and an encyclopedic memory—one time, for the New York Times, he reviewed the most recent edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and his friends Edwin Hubble, whom the space telescope is named after, Igor Stravinsky, and others said, “He never forgot any of it. He remembered the entire thing!”

So here’s this enormous intelligence, this enormous, incredible memory and access to knowledge, and he said, “Well, you know, to Swami Prabhavananda’s idea of an eternal religion, let’s find out.” What he did was read all of the mystical literature he could get his hands on from the established traditions. After a couple of years of that, he said, “Thumbs up! Yeah, you know, there does seem to be a certain pattern of ideas that we find cutting across the mystical literature,” and he reduced those to what he called the “minimum working hypothesis.”

He’s saying that all mystics are basically, or fundamentally, making four points. One is that there is, in addition to this physical universe, a transcendent aspect beyond time and space. All mystics are saying this: there’s an Absolute.

And this absolute, transcendent reality, point number two, is also immanent as physical reality. So physical reality is not in a dual, dialectical relationship to the transcendent, where there are these two things, but in a relationship where the transcendent—the Absolute that’s beyond time and space—is fountaining up into, manifesting up into, this realm of time and space.

The analogy I use for that is that it’s like an ocean. The one ocean manifests at the surface level as waves. The waves are multiple and many, but they’re not anything separate from the ocean itself.

Rick: Right. And just to throw in a comment on that, I mean, this is the theme of my talk at

SAND: if you actually look closely at the physical creation, even what science has told us about it, the divine intelligence is staring you in the face. There are so many qualities that the transcendent is said to have, which you can actually see revealed in the manifest universe if you know how to look.

Dana: Great, great. So Huxley would totally agree with that. The third point of the minimum working hypothesis is that human beings can actually experience reality that way. One aspect of relative reality, the world that is inside time and space, is you, and another aspect of it is me. But since all of physical reality is fountaining up out of this Absolute, this transcendent, then in some sense you and I must have a transcendent bottom to us, if you will, or a transcendent aspect.

Human beings, the mystics claim, can actually experience that transcendent aspect that they share in common with all of reality. The fourth and last aspect of the minimum working hypothesis is that not only can we experience reality that way, that’s what we’re here to do. The purpose of human existence, they say, is to wake up to every aspect of what we are—or I should say, the most fundamental aspect of what we are.

When our relative consciousness is experiencing that, what Meister Eckhart called the “divine ground of being,” that transcendent aspect, that’s what Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith termed the “unitive experience,” or, yeah—

Rick: Nice.

Dana: Nondual experience, you and I would call it.

Rick: And related to points three and four, there was someone in your book whom you quoted and whom Huston found exciting, who proposed that the very mechanics of creation are such that more and more sophisticated, complex forms are evolved for the very purpose of the divine ground experiencing itself—as if it continues to create forms that are more and more capable of enabling it to know itself as a living experience.

Dana: Yeah, and this is thinking—I’ve been reading a lot of Friedrich Schelling lately, the nineteenth-century German idealist philosopher. I recommend Schelling, by the way, to folks out there who are watching this podcast.

Schelling believed in—let’s see if I can unpack this for you very quickly—there’s the idea of pantheism, that God is in all things. In animistic religions, there are gods of mountains, like Mount Fuji in Japan. There are gods of trees and rivers, naiads and dryads: here a god, there a god, everywhere a god; God is everywhere.

Then there’s a concept in the academic study of religion, panentheism, which is saying not only is God in everything, but everything is God. Back to the analogy of the ocean and the waves: if God is the ocean, then the waves are little discrete moments of God. Rumi once said, “You’re not a drop in the ocean; you’re the ocean in a drop.” So that plays into this.

But then there’s what Schelling and others have called evolutionary panentheism. It’s a viewpoint that’s termed evolutionary panentheism. What that means is that, on the physical level of being, reality—later on, people like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, post-Darwin, are saying—when we look at the physical evolution of species from a Darwinian perspective, evolutionary panentheists would say that what nature is trying to do—and nature here is basically synonymous with God in this particular instance—is evolve beings that have a nervous system complex enough to wake up to the reality that they are the ocean; that the waves are trying to realize their ocean-ness.

In a sense—well, not in a sense, but in actuality—for Schelling, this was the idea that we’re God’s eyes and God’s fingertips on some level. Right now, as you’re sitting here and you’re an active consciousness, you are an aspect of the rays of God’s light that are active in the world. To act in the most enlightened fashion, we need to fully self-actualize, plug into the source of our awakening, which is God, the Absolute, the ocean.

We’re God’s eyes and God’s fingertips on some level.

Rick: Well, from now on, if anybody asks me what my religion is, I’m going to tell them I’m an evolutionary panentheist.

Dana: Okay, good! That’s good!

Rick: Because that resonates. That totally rings a bell for me.

Dana: Well, you know, for me, that’s very descriptive. And you know what’s wonderful about it socially? It’s confusing enough that they won’t get mad at you.

Rick: Yeah!

Dana: They’ll go to talk with somebody else at the cocktail party.

Rick: Yeah, they’ll kind of run away.

Dana: Oh, no doubt.

Rick: That’s my tactic with fundamentalists if they call. I start talking astronomy with them and going into the size of the galaxy and the size of the universe. If Jesus lived only 33 years, was he on tour, going to all these other undoubtedly inhabited places? And they say, “Oh, nice talking to you!”

Dana: Yeah, I bet they really enjoy you for that. You know, I thought of something to say relative to the four points about the perennial knowledge.

Rick: Okay, go for it.

Dana: Well, one thing I think that’s important is that when Huston takes up that piece of esoteric religion, one thing he often points out is that we can say, “Okay, Rumi has these mystical experiences, Shankara has them, etc., etc. Buddhists have luminaries like Akshobhya or somebody, but what about the average person?”

He believes, and I believe too, that all people have these experiences. They may not necessarily know how to interpret them relative to what we’re talking about today, but the experience is there, and they may place a value on it.

I gave a workshop down at my friend Alex Gray, the painter Alex Gray’s facility in New York last spring. What I started out with was asking the audience, “Tell me about your most sublime experience. Tell me about something that’s become a touchstone that you keep coming back to as valuable in your life.”

One woman raised her hand and said, “I was walking down the street in New York City one day, and I felt like every person I saw, I knew them. I knew them in some profound, intimate way.” Even making eye contact, she said she felt like she was them and they were her. She couldn’t understand what was happening to her, but that experience, periodically, with some regularity, keeps floating up in her mind as significant.

Then somebody else said, “You know, just the other day I was walking down the beach with my dog, and I fell into this experience of timelessness. I have a busy, high-powered job, but I didn’t care about it. I didn’t care about the future, and I didn’t care about the past. I just felt like everything was okay, and I can’t explain it. It was just a sense of the eternal and timeless.”

Huston would say, based on Huxley’s Minimum Working Hypothesis, that your own eternality was floating forward into your purview; that that transcendent level of your own being was coming into focus, coming into your experience; and so you were feeling your own timelessness in that timeless experience.

For the woman, you were feeling that level of being where everything is profoundly interconnected because, on the most profound level, it’s just a oneness.

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: So I think people regularly have these experiences, and in a lot of cases they dismiss them because they have what they think are more important duties to perform. But we shouldn’t create a view that only some great luminary standing on a mountain with a 50,000-watt, rainbow-colored aura is having these experiences. I think, quite frankly, children have them regularly.

Rick: Well, if points three and four of the perennial philosophy are true, then the surprising thing would be if people didn’t have these experiences. If the world, if the universe, is nothing but the Divine appearing as form, then we’re just sort of swimming in the ocean of the Divine.

There’s that old saying: the absurdity of a fish being thirsty in water and looking for water when it’s completely in the water. So here we are, just—you know, we’re part of—

Dana: Absurd fish.

Rick: Yeah. And so it’s not surprising, I think, that spiritual experiences are relatively commonplace. In my experience doing this show, they’re becoming more so all the time. It just seems to be spreading like an epidemic, and people are waking up whether or not they’re even looking for it. Those who are looking for it are waking up more readily, or having deep awakenings or profound experiences more readily. So something good is happening.

Dana: I think so too. I mean, I think one part of your program that’s so interesting to me, as you talk to all the people having these experiences, is that as the experience proliferates—which I, of course, hope it does—then it takes… It’s related to what I was saying about only a few, a select few, people saying, “Oh, I’m going to put these people up on a pedestal because they’re so unusual.” If it is happening more commonly and people recognize these experiences in their own lives, then it will… What am I trying to say?

Rick: Democratize?

Dana: Yeah, democratize. It takes away some of the hierarchical power structures that we saw when Asian religions first immigrated on a large scale into the United States in the 1960s. In the same way that Huxley would have argued, “Yeah, somebody has this profound experience—the Buddha, Jesus, whoever”—as structures come up, people who are very interested in power and control are always attracted to structure.

We’re seeing that in the presidential election right now. I’m not going to name names, but people can guess who I’m talking about. As people are attracted to those structures, they start to create dogmas and become gatekeepers in religions that, from Huxley’s perspective, were preventing awakening more than creating it.

I think sometimes when you look at the power structures of the guru paradigms in the 1960s, even after 30 and 40 years of practice and meditation, those gurus were very stingy about handing out any kind of authority to their followers: “Oh, I’ll still be the great one who tells you what to do and when to do it.” You see what I’m saying.

Rick: Oh, yeah. I mean, it made them nervous. Deepak Chopra got a little bit too authoritative or respected in his own right around Maharishi, and he and Maharishi had to have a parting of the ways. Another friend of mine started to think and feel that way, and Maharishi had this little meeting with him. He said, “You know, I really love you, and you’ve been a really good, close student, but you’re becoming too independent in your thinking, so I have to let you go.”

I just happen to know those stories because I was in the TM movement, but I bet there are similar stories in many other groups.

Dana: You know, I had an experience of it the other day. I have to tell you really quickly. I was in the Newark airport on my way back from visiting my mother in Florida, and I’m walking through the airport. Here is this guy from India, and he’s wearing sadhu orange and a tilak on his forehead that identifies him as a Vaishnava, with long black hair. I never miss an opportunity to speak Hindi, so I walked up to him and said, “Abhigahasa, where are you from?”

He lights up because somebody speaks his language, and we start having this conversation. A moment or two later, several of his Western devotees in Krishna garb are now surrounding us. In those moments, I could see his demeanor and attitude change. There was a certain discomfort. They felt that they didn’t know what we were talking about, and there was an energy toward me: “How can you just chit-chat with the Great One?”

He also started to buy into it a little bit. Before, he was very congenial; I could see him sort of shift into “I’m the Great One” mode, even in his conversation. So these structures are there.

Rick: There’s a mutual feedback loop with that kind of thing. The students feed the teacher, the teacher feeds the students, and they carry on like that.

Dana: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, they feed the dynamic. Do they feed themselves in a larger way? I mean, the answer has got to be yes and no. But anyway, for Americans, where there’s this idea of the sovereignty of individual choice—or there used to be—Phil Goldberg, our friend, said in American Veda that there was such an interesting irony in the 1960s: the most anti-authoritarian generation in the history of the United States surrendering all authority to gurus. I mean, what a funny dynamic that was.

But once burned, twice shy. I think increasingly—and increasingly because of what you say, Dana, about the experience being recognized more often, and more people having a richer, fuller version of the experience—we’re seeing a democratization of the unitive experience.

Rick: Yeah. I hope so. I hope we are. I swear we’re going to get back to Huston, but all this relates to him. We’re going to get back to him specifically. But you said an interesting thing in an email exchange we had recently: no problem with gurus, but you should have four or five of them, because when they disagree with each other, as they inevitably will, then you’ll be thrown back upon your own understanding, your own resources. How did you say it?

Dana: Well, you know, you’ll realize that you’re going to have to make up your own mind. Ultimately, it’s your journey. Ultimately, it’s your journey. You can’t always ask the guru what you think, or what you should think. When you’re dealing with four or five, they will inevitably disagree with each other.

You recently interviewed Andrew Harvey, and Andrew and I have talked about this. When he split from Mother Meera, that was a great moment of insight and self-actualization for him. He never, ever, for a moment doubted that she was continuously having the non-dual experience, but he disagreed with her in certain ways about how that should be interpreted and what its consequences are for social life.

Rick: Yeah, which leads me right into a quote from your book. I hope I’m quoting you properly here. You said, “Unity can’t be maintained continuously, even if a person were continuously experiencing the Divine Ground”—which I believe they can be—“he or she would still be a person with limitations. Spiritual maturity is coming to terms with both our timeless and temporal natures. We are infinitely ‘betterable,’ but never perfectible.”

We are infinitely “betterable,” but never perfectible.

Dana: Hmm, hmm. Do you want to say something more about that?

Rick: No, you go ahead.

Dana: Okay. Well, two things come to my mind. First of all, one doesn’t have to live in Paris all the time to know that Paris is there. If you’ve ever been to Paris, then you know what Paris is on some level, and you can’t deny its existence because you experienced it.

So people who are watching right now, or will watch, who’ve had this experience: don’t deny it. There it is. It’s part of you, informing your life. Like the person who had the experience of timelessness walking on the beach with their dog, let it keep informing you.

For those of you who are having a continuous non-dual experience, Huston would say—and I would agree with him—it’s important to face the fact that you also have temporal aspects to what you are. You’re intelligent, but you’re not—as I can safely say, probably anybody listening to this is not—as intelligent as Aldous Huxley was on that one spectrum of IQ-type intelligence. Which is a…

Rick: Nor are they as good a piano player as Chopin, or as good a baseball player as Babe Ruth. We all have limitations on the relative level.

Dana: Exactly, exactly. Even in terms of the incorporation of the non-dual experience into one’s life, the experience can always be there, but is it informing all levels of your emotional maturity? Is it informing all levels of your social maturity? That’s a big project that goes on and on.

Rick: Yeah. Well, should we pursue this? Because there’s more we could talk about here, but we still want to keep going.

Dana: You want to go back to Huston, and of course that’s what I most want to talk about, frankly.

Rick: Yeah, well, let’s go back to Huston. Maybe we’ll get back into this as we go along, because there’s more we can pursue in this angle that you just brought up. Let me ask you a short, straightforward question: Why is Huston important?

Why Huston Smith matters

Dana: He’s very important for several reasons. The most important of the important reasons, I would say, is that he was the first scholar in modern times to take religion seriously as having real value.

In the 1940s and ’50s, when he was first finishing graduate school and then teaching, it was typical in colleges and universities that you really could only teach religion if you hated it. Modernists agreed with Marx that religion was the opiate of the masses, or with Freud that religion is based on an infantile model: We realize there are things our actual parents aren’t capable of doing, and so we reach out to cosmic parents to take care of us, pray to them, and ask them for help.

Rick: It’s also interesting to throw in there that Freud thought that the transcendent, or the experiences of it, were just some regression to the security of the womb or nursing or something, that he didn’t take that seriously. But anyway, keep going.

Dana: That’s right. He called it the “oceanic experience,” that it’s what we experience in the womb. In our first conscious experiences, we experience no separation between self and other, and so we long to go back into the womb—that idea.

Freud said, “Hey, stop going to church, start coming to see me, and get some therapy around this.” So, agreeing with modernists, a lot of academics said, “It’s the 1940s, man. It’s the 1950s. Let’s outgrow this religion mumbo-jumbo, let go of our superstitions, and march forward.”

Along comes Huston Smith and says, “Well, how come music professors get to love music, and how come art professors—art history professors—get to love art, but I, as a teacher of religion, can’t love religion and point out its good aspects?” There has been bad music; music professors aren’t obligated to play only the bad music.

Huston was really one of the first people to say, “Instead of evaluating religion all the time and judging religion all the time pejoratively, how about if I simply describe religion? What if I just say, ‘Okay, in my course’”—he was first teaching primarily at MIT, and taught in Denver before that, and at Washington University even earlier—“Why don’t I describe the religions in such a way that proponents of those religions would at least recognize them? Why don’t we start there?”

That’s what he did when he wrote The Religions of Man back in the 1950s. People thought he must be some kind of weird schizophrenic guy, because as he changed chapters it was almost as if he changed religions: He became an apologist for this new faith he was describing in every new chapter.

Rick: You know, as I read your book, I got the sense that it was Huston’s humility that enabled him to do that. He didn’t have a particular ax to grind or a viewpoint to defend or impose upon others, and that made him capable of appreciating all the different traditions and religions. It made him capable of approaching them respectfully.

Dana: I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s exactly right. In my experience, he has always been a very humble person. He himself says that he never had any great, profound, new insights, that his genius, if he has one, is really an intuitive ability to hear the truth in other people’s theories, and then become a kind of champion of various sets of theories that, over his life, have rung most true.

Rick: Yeah, that in itself is pretty significant, because if you think about it, just about every member of a religious group or spiritual group has either very overtly or at least subliminally this attitude that “ours is the best thing,” and that therefore everything else is inferior to some degree. Many wouldn’t say it; some do say it and pound it into others, but there’s just sort of this attitude, and you get the sense that Huston was really free of that and just approached everything with a kind of childlike openness.

Dana: I think that’s exactly right. Two thoughts come to my mind. One is when I interviewed Deepak Chopra for the book, he said that he had read Huston Smith’s The Religions of Man, now The World’s Religions, which is still in print, what, 57 years later. He had been amazed by it. As a 14-year-old boy in Delhi, he read the book and shared it with his father.

Arvind Sharma, another Hindu academic, told me that when his father read the book, also in Delhi, he said, “Wow, this guy is understanding my religion even better than I do!” And so there was that deep desire to present the religions, to describe the religions, in a way that was authentic and in a way that their followers would recognize. And then, okay, now I’ve forgotten the second reason that I wanted to mention.

Rick: Well, I’ll just throw a question at you, and it’ll probably come to mind when you have a moment. Let’s… I’m going to go through some more of my notes here. Well, I want to sort of trace through Huston’s life quickly, in terms of the various spiritual paths that he delved into, and that’ll sort of give us a better sense of the man and what kind of experiences he went through. But I don’t know, we can do that. I’m torn between asking you all these other questions.

Dana: Well, you know, one thing, and it relates to what we’ve just been talking about: the reason he was so well able to describe these religions is that he apprenticed himself to proponents of the religions. He said, “Okay, let me read their sacred texts, let me read what their apologists say, and let me apprentice myself with swamis or rabbis or…”

Rick: Sufi masters.

Dana: “Or mullahs.”

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: Yeah, and so he did that. In some cases, like, he studied with Swami Satprakashananda, another monk of the Ramakrishna Order, for 10 years. He studied Zen Buddhism with D. T. Suzuki for 10 years. He went to Japan to study Zen Buddhism at Myoshinji.

Rick: Yeah, there was this point in the book where he was in this Zen monastery on a retreat, and for about eight hours a day he had to sit in lotus or some such position, contemplating: If so-and-so says that a dog doesn’t have Buddha nature, but such-and-such says that even a blade of grass has Buddha nature, how do you reconcile this? He had to think about that for eight hours a day or something, in pain because of his sitting position, and I thought, “God, what an arduous path. I could never have done anything like that.”

Dana: Well, there’s lots to say about that, but it does show his commitment.

Rick: His determination, yeah.

Dana: It’s extraordinary, yeah. And his humility, in that he really just wanted to get it right in terms of each one of those descriptions—that part of it.

Rick: Yeah. So there was Hinduism, Swami Satprakashananda, there was his serious application to Zen practice, and perhaps you might want to say a little bit more about that, but then he found himself in Cambridge, teaching at MIT, and he ran into Timothy Leary.

Dana: And he ran into Timothy Leary, and so you hold that thought, because my other thought just came back.

Okay, we won’t forget Timothy Leary.

Rick: Yeah, that Huston felt like, when he was studying each one of these religions, this esoteric aspect of religion kept coming up in his experience. That, perhaps partially because he was looking through that Huxleyan lens of the minimum working hypothesis, as he apprenticed himself in each one of these traditions, he kept feeling like, “Wow, there’s something to this.” He didn’t report it very often in his early writing, but on the experiential level he could see those as viable pathways into nondual experience.

Dana: Yeah, I think Ramakrishna did something similar, didn’t he? He kind of, even post-awakening—or whatever awakening is—applied himself to various spiritual traditions and went through all their rituals and paths in order to climb the mountain from that angle, and then from that angle.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there are several people who have done that, but I would agree that Ramakrishna was one. So then Timothy Leary—so then Timothy Leary. And that’s a fun story in some ways.

When I wrote the original manuscript for the book, the editor said, “Wow, you spend a lot of time talking about Huston’s interaction with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass. You’ve got to cut this down somewhat, because it’s a major part of the story.” And I found that I could only cut it down so far, because it was not only so darn much fun to talk about, but there was so much relevant information in there relative not only to Huston’s journey, but to the journey of a lot of people in our age group who lived through the ’60s and experimented with psychedelics and all that.

Huxley had written The Doors of Perception back in 1954 or 1955, and it covered his experiences with mescaline. What had happened was, there was a man named Humphry Osmond up in Saskatchewan who was a psychiatrist, and he was working with mental patients. They were using mescaline as part of a treatment program.

Those people started to report that they were having what seemed like mystical experiences. Humphry Osmond didn’t know anything about mysticism, but he had read Aldous Huxley’s book The Perennial Philosophy, published in 1945, in which Huxley had talked about this minimum working hypothesis and this pattern of experiences that cut across the mystical traditions.

So Osmond said, “Hey, maybe Aldous Huxley would be able to make sense of my patients’ experiences.” He sent some letters to Aldous, and they started a correspondence. Aldous said, “Maybe I would recognize it as a valid mystical experience or not if I tried it.”

Well, it wasn’t against the law, and Osmond was coming to a professional conference in Los Angeles, where Aldous was living, so he brought some mescaline with him. Aldous Huxley tried mescaline in 1954. To use a euphemism for my generation, he broke on through to the other side. He definitely had a mind-blowing experience.

He felt like, for the first time, he had really had a profound experience of nondual consciousness, of the beatific vision, and that’s what he wrote about in The Doors of Perception. Okay, fast-forward almost 10 years.

Rick: It’s interesting, just as a side note, that as Huxley was dying—as he died—he had his wife inject him with LSD because he wanted to go out with full consciousness of the deeper dimensions.

Dana: Yeah, you know, I talked with Laura, his wife, about that. She injected him twice, actually, and Timothy Leary had brought the substance to them while they were there. I mean, I’ve always thought: What an extraordinary experience, to go directly from waking-state consciousness to death—not from an opiated stupor, like most people experience, but from not only waking-state consciousness, but a psychedelic experience of melting into the absolute. Quite… I mean, you have to admire the courage, if nothing else.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Dana: But anyway, what happened was Timothy Leary—now we’re talking about Timothy Leary almost 10 years later—had come to Harvard and was a very well-respected psychologist at that time. He had a book out at that time on human personality that was basically the book, and that’s why they brought him to Harvard.

Well, he had an experience on psilocybin down in Mexico, I think in Zihuatanejo, but I’m not sure. He said he learned more about psychology in four hours on this substance than he had learned in his entire PhD program.

Anyway, he wanted to create a research program at Harvard using psilocybin, which eventually became called the Harvard Psychedelic Project. Again, it wasn’t illegal at that time. In the same way, people who were being given the substance—volunteers who were being given the substance—had to fill out these elaborate questionnaires afterward. They seemed to be describing mystical experiences.

So Leary got ahold of Huxley and said, “What do you think?” Huxley said, “I don’t have time to work on this right now, but one of my very close friends, Huston Smith, is teaching right there in your area at MIT. You’re at Harvard, he’s at MIT. Why don’t you ask him? He’s got some real expertise in this area.”

So Timothy Leary got ahold of Huston and said, “Would you look at these reports, these questionnaires?” And that’s exactly what happened. Huston looked at them, was inspired by them, and went the experiential route that Huxley had gone. He got Timothy Leary to give him some psilocybin and joined the project.

🕊️ Psychedelic states and spiritual traits

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting and sad to consider the direction that Leary’s life went in. There’s a quote here from Huston, I believe. It said, “Drugs appear to be able to induce religious experiences; it is less evident that they can produce religious lives.” And he talked about traits over states. Then there’s

Alan Watts: “When you receive the message, hang up the phone.”

But it was perhaps an interesting lesson for everyone to see how Timothy Leary became increasingly unbalanced as he took more and more drugs and began experimenting with a greater variety of drugs, greater quantities of drugs, and all sorts of things.

I think there’s a cautionary note here, since we’re talking about hallucinogens in a way that might almost seem to recommend them. It’s not something that one necessarily has to do or should do or anything else. It’s something that these guys did, and there are other methods, I would say. You and I both did them, and they were eye-openers, but hopefully we hung up the phone.

Drugs appear to be able to induce religious experiences; it is less evident that they can produce religious lives.

Dana: Well, you know, on the question of whether we should hang up the phone, one inconsistency that I’ve heard in that message from Huston Smith is that when he talks about psychedelic use in America, he often says, “Once you get the message, hang up the phone.” And yet, at the same time, he became a great champion of the Native American Church, which uses peyote as their sacrament, and they continue to use it as a sacrament throughout life.

In some ways, I see that as a kind of disconnect in his message. I mean…

Rick: And I didn’t get to this chapter in the book yet, but there’s a peyote chapter later on, much later in his life: peyote in Mazatlán. So you can’t just sort of generalize anything. But…

Dana: But you know, I totally agree with you, Rick, that Huston is saying, “Okay, Tim, you’re encouraging all these young people to take psychedelics and turn on, tune in, drop out.” I don’t agree with you.

In 1966, there was a conference on psychedelics, an academic conference primarily in Berkeley, and that was when Tim Leary gave his “Turn on, tune in, drop out” message to the youth of America. When it came time for Huston to speak, he was probably angrier than he’s ever been in his life.

He’s a very kind, gentle person, and he saw that as totally irresponsible: “You’re encouraging an entire culture you’ve come from…” He couldn’t agree with that.

So from Huston’s perspective, when are you going to live a religious life? When is it going to be… when do these altered states of consciousness result in mature traits of behavior where you become more socially conscious, more… you know what I’m talking about.

Rick: Yeah. Well, at that time in 1966, the Vietnam War was heating up, and later on, Richard Nixon branded Timothy Leary as, what, the most dangerous man in America or something like that. So I think he was definitely giving voice to a particular theme that was pretty lively in the American national consciousness, at least the more rebellious wing of it, in opposition to the Vietnam War and to the materialism of the ’50s that hadn’t seemed to resonate with the exploratory, adventurous nature of life that young people were experiencing.

So, I don’t know. It’s like he had a piece of the puzzle. Fine, it’s not good to just sort of swallow the status quo and accept it, because things do need to change. But there are constructive and destructive ways of changing.

Dana: That’s right. You can evolve society without necessarily launching a full-scale revolution. You can…

Rick: Yeah, I mean, that was one of the themes of the ’60s: Do we tear everything down? There were the Weathermen and those who started blowing up buildings and stuff. “We’re just going to tear it all down and then build who knows what out of the ashes.” And then there were those who wanted to kind of shift the direction and the momentum in a more evolutionary way.

Dana: Right, right. And Huston was more that way. What ended up happening was that Leary and Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass, were eventually kicked out of Harvard, as most people listening to this probably know. They started an organization called the International Federation for Internal Freedom, IFIF, and Huston once called it the “iffiest organization in the world.” But he was a part of it, as were Alan Watts and a whole group of really forward-thinking people that I respect.

When Leary made Millbrook, in upstate New York, the new base of the organization, they were launching all kinds of strange, crazy experiments up there that may have had value, but Huston felt uncomfortable with. Huston’s daughters were teenagers then, and when he took them up there, there was a crazy scene and a lot of drugs, and he felt uncomfortable going.

So he broke loose from Leary and Alpert at that time and felt like, “Okay, maybe this isn’t my place. I’m an academic. I don’t want to just scream and yell at other academics. I want to be a part of a discussion and lead things in a new direction.”

Rick: Yeah, I suppose one more thing to touch upon, since we’re on this topic, is the current enthusiasm for ayahuasca and so on. I haven’t been there and have no desire to go, but apparently it’s quite a scene down in Peru, with all kinds of people showing up and just wanting to have this experience.

It’s sort of like a current, modern-day Millbrook in a way, I think, where there’s not a lot of structure or necessarily oversight. For every really legitimate place that you can go to have that experience, there are all kinds of people—just opportunists—trying to cash in on all the moneyed Westerners coming down there.

So I don’t know. I just feel like—and I have friends, even people who volunteer and help BatGap, who have gone there and done that—but I’ve also heard of tragedies and mishaps and all kinds of sexual exploitation and things going on.

So it’s just safety first. That’s what I’m kind of leading to: You can’t necessarily crash the gates of heaven. A pill isn’t going to give you a vision of God.

There’s a long-term project, and it takes a great deal of seriousness, spiritual maturity, dedication, and so on, to really cultivate the kind of life that Huston cultivated. In the West, we want the quick fix, but there is no quick fix.

Dana: Yeah. Well, Huston’s views on all this, which are pretty sophisticated, are in the book, and there’s not time to outline them all. But Huston would say, thinking of the Native American Church, that yes, psychedelics can give you a vision of God, but you still have to integrate that into your life and into your awakening.

There are many aspects to awakening, and as Ken Wilber says, it’s not just about waking up; it’s about growing up and cleaning up. Full spiritual maturity is more than just nondual experience.

On the other hand, I don’t want to be a buzzkill. There is value in those experiences, I would argue. It’s just that, back in the ’60s, so many of us were whoring after the infinite and personal experience of the infinite, putting such a profound premium on that.

We still see that working its way through our culture today. People want that experience of the transcendent. As we started this conversation, good for them. We need to have that experience in our lives.

But even if the Kingdom of Heaven is within, Huston and Huxley believed it’s on us to try to create the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. If it becomes an entertainment, if it becomes a distraction from trying to get traction in the world on social justice issues, human rights issues, and environmental issues, I mean, do we need a lot of people who are having nondual experiences walking on a planet that’s overheated to the point where we can’t exist here anymore?

Sooner or later, the rubber has to meet the road. I would even say—and again, my coffee is working on me too hard—that I see a lot of times with some people who are whoring after the infinite, in the sense that they’re kind of camped out at Kripalu or Esalen, places that I strongly endorse and have taught at, that they’re…

It’s like, “Don’t postpone kindness.” I think that’s what I’m trying to say. Don’t say, “Oh, I’ll do all that other stuff once I’ve reached perfect, nondual, continuous experience.” The world needs us right now. We need to remember that we’re beings with bodies who live in a world of material parameters, and people need our help.

Don’t postpone kindness.

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: And that was what bothered Huston about

Leary: He was putting such a premium on states that he put no attention at all on traits and behavior.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, one question I would ask that segues into maybe more discussion on the point you just raised is: Whatever a person is doing—whether it’s what Leary was doing, what people are now doing with ayahuasca, whether they’re engaged in some meditation practice that they’ve been doing for many years, or whatever they’re doing—how’s that working out for you? How’s your life? How happy are you?

How are your relationships, your friendships? What’s the quality of your life? The proof of the pudding is in the…

You should know them by their fruits, I guess. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. A spiritual practice of any nature—chemical or meditational or whatever—should and will have an influence on you. So how is that influence showing up?

Dana: Exactly.

Rick: And might it be time to try something else if things aren’t going so well from what you’ve been doing for…?

Dana: Yeah. Like, how do you get along with your mother? I mean, you see it in some people’s descriptions of their experience. They’ll say, “I love to go to this retreat center because when I’m there, everybody is so spiritual, and we’re talking about spiritual things, and the vibe is so wonderful and welcoming and blissful.”

Then they report that, “When I leave the campus of whatever retreat center after a week,” they have a kind of noetic tan, an afterglow that lasts a few days. But then, very quickly, they feel like they want to run back inside the retreat center.

From a Buddhist perspective—and Buddhists who are listening to this know exactly what I’m talking about—the Buddhist message is, “We have the most to learn from our enemies.” There are no true enemies in Buddhism, but the idea is that those who anger us, or those who push on us in a way that compromises our ability to be centered, are the ones we have the most to learn from.

Those are the ones who can teach us patience. Those are the ones who can show us where we still have work to do on the emotional level, where we still need to get over our own ego, perhaps, and things like that.

Rick: Yeah, I think the Dalai Lama once referred to the Chinese as “my friends, the enemy,” or something like that.

Dana: Yeah, I mean, he has no hatred toward them. Huston Smith once said that’s one of the greatest miracles he’s ever witnessed.

Rick: Yeah. So I know it’s close to your heart, and I believe it was close to Huston’s. I shouldn’t put him in the past tense because he’s still alive, although barely so. I mean, he’s…

Dana: Barely so.

Rick: Yeah, he’s just hanging in there these days. We’re speaking now in March of 2016, but he’s more or less on his deathbed, and it’s an honor to be having this conversation about him while he is still alive.

But what was I about to say? Oh, the whole thing about states versus traits, and how you shall know them by their fruits, and the things you were starting to say about being generous and compassionate and helping in some way, and so on and so forth, which has often been characteristic of spiritual people.

There’s a guy named Radhanath Swami, whom you may know, whom I interviewed years ago. He’s a leader in the Hare Krishna movement. He feeds something like 250,000 children a good meal every day and has eye clinics and things like that in the Mumbai area, I think it is.

All sorts of different spiritual leaders have embarked upon social missions, and I think probably, if you talk to them, they would regard that both as an expression of their spirituality and perhaps also as a means—as a kind of natural outpouring of compassion that results from having a full heart, which is one of the characteristics of spiritual awakening.

It’s not just plain-vanilla consciousness waking up, but faculties such as the heart and compassion wake up. Also, engaging in activities like that can be a spiritual practice in and of itself. They can attenuate the ego and get one’s attention off of oneself and onto others.

That can… Well, Adam Bucko, whom I interviewed at the Science and Nonduality Conference, I tried to ask him this question: “Can what you’re doing be seen as conducive to your own evolution?” He didn’t even care. He was so into it and wanting to help suffering people that he wasn’t even thinking of himself anymore.

Dana: I think that shows how conducive it is to spiritual evolution.

Rick: Yeah, exactly.

Dana: The ego isn’t there. What a wonderful person he is, doing such incredible work. Yeah, extraordinary.

I mean, there are lots of good examples of that in history, right? St. Francis is a good example of that sort of phenomenon. But, yeah, I don’t know if it always happens. I think that people who have done more of the cleaning-up and growing-up work are more likely to move in that particular direction.

I’m thinking of Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. They actually expressed some mild anger toward the various gurus and paramparas—lineages of saints—in India, because they so rarely did anything involving social activism.

If you look at the Ramakrishna movement, that’s one of the things they pride themselves on: how much social outreach they do. I think a lot of the tendencies among Hare Krishnas and others in India today to start their own outreach movements and social welfare movements were inspired by the work of the Ramakrishna Order.

🕊️ Spirituality and social responsibility

Rick: Yeah. It’s become kind of a modern trend, so to speak, to recognize a need to walk our talk.

Somebody posted a comment on YouTube just the other day on one of my interviews. I think it might have been Mooji’s, but I’m not sure, or maybe it was something else. I know what it was—it wasn’t Mooji’s. But anyway, the comment was something along the lines of, “The world is illusory, so who’s doing what for whom if you engage in social action? You’re just sort of, I don’t know, polishing up an illusory thing; and we should just be focused on truth, on reality, on pure knowledge.” And I’m sure Huston would have disagreed with that. I’ve heard other contemporary spiritual teachers say things like that, so what do you think Huston would say to that kind of a comment?

Dana: It’s profoundly wrong. From a God’s-eye view of reality, everything is always all right, capital A, capital R. From a God’s-eye view, even on the deepest levels of our own being, there’s nothing we can do wrong. But down here, in the world where people bleed and where people starve to death, and where global warming is taking place, on this level we should most definitely get involved.

I mean, can you imagine? I’m suspecting that the Jews who survived Auschwitz would like this idea that the camp shouldn’t have been liberated, because what difference does it make on the God’s-eye level of things? Ignorance and suffering should be attacked from all sides, and one of those sides is down here where we live.

Ignorance and suffering should be attacked from all sides, and one of those sides is down here where we live.

Rick: Yeah, well, there was a saying that you and I both heard Maharishi say many times, which is that knowledge is different in different states of consciousness, and in a similar way, reality is different in different states of consciousness. And he was big on dealing with each level appropriately, not confusing levels. If you have an infected toe, go to the doctor or something; don’t just say it’s an illusory toe.

Dana: Well, even you and I, if we say—and I think you and I do completely agree on this inside of our shared viewpoint—that the deepest level of your being and the deepest level of my being is the same level of being, that it’s the Absolute looking out through two different sets of eyes. So, okay, in our essential and deepest nature, this God’s-eye view of things, we’re the same.

Okay, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to come over to your house and drive your car because I am you, and I am the car, and I am, you know. There’s also a recognition that on the level of the ocean we’re one, but on the level of the waves we’re two.

Rick: Yeah, it seems obvious, but the way some people talk, it doesn’t seem obvious to them, anyway. And, to take absurd examples, I don’t drive my car into a bridge because the bridge and my car are one. There are so many absurd examples you could bring up. But again, if people are suffering, yeah, fine, their eternal, unmanifest cosmic being is not suffering; that’s beyond suffering. But on the relative level, they’re suffering, and it behooves us to try to help them.

Dana: Yeah, yeah, a toothache hurts, and if you’re a dentist, pull that tooth out.

Rick: Yeah, and speaking of global warming, I mean—

Dana: Sorry to laugh; that’s funny, toothache to global warming.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t know. You had been speaking of it earlier, but I have an ongoing argument with a friend who doesn’t believe it’s true and thinks it’s some kind of government conspiracy to raise money through carbon taxes or something. But in any case, it could be the most dire problem facing humanity.

If we think the Syrian refugee and migration crisis is a problem, imagine if we have to evacuate all the world’s coastal cities and Bangladesh and places like that all at once—what kind of social chaos there’s going to be, and how many people are going to die, and so on and so forth. And that won’t just be—it will impact us all, financially and in many other ways. It won’t just be something we can easily brush off as illusion.

And the reason I’m bringing that up is just that I’ve always felt, and feel strongly, that there’s a very deep and direct practical implication to spiritual development, individually and collectively: that it is the ultimate antidote to any and all problems. Not that the problems don’t have to be dealt with on their own level, but without that deeper awakening, there’s a kind of foundation missing for really changing the consciousness that gives rise to the problems in the first place. It’s reminiscent of that quote Einstein is famous for. So anyway, would Huston have agreed with that?

Dana: Definitely, definitely, definitely. I mean, that was his whole career: recapturing the voice of the ancients that told us that we need to embrace the transcendent aspect, the metaphysical aspect of what we are.

But relative to your global warming comment, you’re not going to be able to grow spiritually if you don’t exist.

Rick: True, or if you’re starving to death or have some terrible disease because all the diseases are going wild in a warming planet.

Dana: Yeah, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. One time George Harrison was asked, “Do you still believe all you need is love?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m sticking to it. All you need is love and a sandwich.”

But like you say, if you have no food in your stomach and you can’t even get up because you’re dehydrated, how are you going to put any attention on your spiritual growth as these problems of global warming continue and exacerbate? Then it’s on us. If we’re going to create the kingdom of heaven on Earth, then we’ve got to help people at least exist. You know?

Rick: Yeah, we need bodies to evolve, and we need planets for bodies to live on. I saw Buckminster Fuller speak at the Amherst SDI Symposium in the summer of ’71. I don’t know if you were there, but he was famous for a book.

Dana: I was there.

Rick: Were you there?

Dana: Yeah, I was there. I saw you there.

Rick: I’m sure you did. And he had that book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

Dana: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Seeing the world as a spaceship with very limited resources and a very delicate eco-structure that we depend on for our very existence.

Dana: Yeah, but improving on that, I think if we look at it as a series of resources that helps us survive, it’s still putting too much attention on us. I think we’re really only going to get to the healthiest place when we start seeing the planet as home and saying, “Hey, these other beings exist on their own. They don’t exist just for what we can do with them. They’re not just a resource for humanity. They have their own value.”

There was an old book on environmental ethics called Do Trees Have Standing? It was basically asking whether there should be environmental laws and environmental rights for other beings, before all this was really as current as it is today. So I think, ideologically, when we can see ourselves as part of the life of the planet, and that the planet has its own value and its own dignity that we should respect, then we’re more likely to get where we need to go.

Rick: Well, if we really are the Self in all beings, if that which we essentially are—you were talking a minute ago about the two of us really being one, looking out through two different sets of eyes—then the Amazon rainforest is our lungs in a very personal sense, and all these various species, hundreds of them going extinct every day, are appendages of our own body that we are lopping off.

Dana: Yeah, yeah. I have a student at the college right now who’s back only very recently from Afghanistan, and he has a service dog. He gets very nervous and very upset, this veteran. When he gets really off-center, he’ll take the dog—his service dog—and he tells me that he makes eye contact with the service dog. The peace that the service dog is experiencing, he can plug into that and use it as a touchstone and a resource.

Of course, I was thinking, well, it’s not just that the dog is calm, but it’s the eyes, the mirrors of the soul kind of idea—that even he finds something of his deeper self inside the dog’s spirit or being.

Rick: Yeah, nice. So you and I love talking to each other, and we could probably sit here all day with occasional bathroom and food breaks and keep talking, but I’m not sure. And actually, it’s kind of impressive. I’ve been watching the view count, and it’s actually been creeping up throughout this conversation. It started in the 40s, and then it hung in the 50s for a while, and now it’s up to 71. So I guess we’re not boring people.

Dana: Welcome, new people.

Rick: So we must be doing something right here. But we’ve been going for about two hours, so we should probably get around to wrapping it up. There are probably dozens of things that we could have talked about that we haven’t, because we’ve just been rambling all over the place with all kinds of things that interest us.

Religious diversity without exclusivism

Getting back to Huston one more time, what is important about Huston that you and I haven’t discussed during this interview that you want to be sure to bring out before we wrap it up?

Dana: One or a couple of points, I would say. One relates to something you said earlier, Rick, about how people in a particular religion can confuse a means for an end. They can become so focused and dogmatic about their own tradition that they’re starting at the place academics in the study of religion often call the “exclusivists,” because they’re saying, “My religion is right, and all the rest of you are stupid and deluded. I’m a hard-shelled Christian, and all these Muslims coming into my country, Hindus coming into my country, are compromising America,” confusing their religion with Jeffersonian democracy.

And so they’re exclusivists. Then there are also people Huston points out who are “inclusivists.” “Inclusivists” can mean “well” but do “wrong,” and what he meant by that is that some people believe all the religions are really saying the same thing—that all the different religions are really giving one message. They try to conflate those religions or homogenize them or distill them into one particular viewpoint, whatever it is, some form of universalism.

Huston felt that’s wrong. First of all, it’s insulting to some members of religion because, for instance, Buddhists don’t believe there’s a creator God. They don’t believe in a creator God. They don’t posit creation in the way that we do in the West. They see it differently. So since they didn’t posit a creation, they don’t posit a creator. We can just leave that for now.

The point is, would Jews agree with that? Would Christians agree with that—that there is no creator? That isn’t the same thing. We can give so many examples of how the religions differ.

So Huston Smith, in a sense, is important because he gave a third choice. There are exclusivists and there are inclusivists, but Huston was giving this third choice of saying that if we split the religions into an exoteric aspect and an esoteric aspect, then we realize that exoterically the religions differ from each other quite dramatically in relation to their own populations, their own economic and environmental settings, and their own languages.

Those exoteric forms have tremendous value and function in those societies, while also recognizing that there’s this esoteric level where we should recognize that their mystics very often reveal a pattern of similarity. So that’s one thing I think if people read the biography of Huston Smith and explored those ideas with him, they would really enjoy.

Rick: Here’s a paragraph I extracted on that very point. He said, “For the esoterics, the physical characteristics of religion have only provisional importance, but for the exoterics they are the absolute truth, and justifiably so, because those people need secure structures to cling to. Esoterics shouldn’t confuse exoterics by emphasizing the underlying unity. The external structures should maintain their differences.”

Esoterics shouldn’t confuse exoterics by emphasizing the underlying unity.

Dana: Yeah, like if you’re using a trail map to climb a trail up a mountain, but you’ve actually got the wrong map for that trail, that’s when you can become confused. The idea is that every trail is an established pathway up the mountain. Now, is everybody climbing the mountain? No. Do they need to be? Well, I wish they would. I wish they would be that experienced, but at the same time, as I said, there’s a value in the religions even on the exoteric level.

So there’s one piece of Huston’s message, that third choice in religion. And then another thing that always struck me about it, when I first read his book—the first time I met Huston Smith, by the way, was probably in about ’77 at the University of Hawaii. I was a grad student there, and meeting Huston Smith for me was like meeting, I don’t know, like some 15-year-old girl meeting Justin Bieber these days, maybe, something like that.

I’ve met some movie stars, and I’m not that impressed with that. In many cases, I don’t know what movies they were in, sorry to say. But meeting Huston Smith—oh, wow, I mean, because he was such a luminary and such a hero of mine. I don’t even know what I said to him.

When we met later and became friends, he said, “Oh, it’s so nice to meet you,” and I told him this embarrassing story where I had a question for him, and when I got up to ask it, my mind was a complete blank. I don’t know what I said, you know, something like, “Hey, do you like this shirt? I could change it if you don’t like it.” I mean, what does the 15-year-old girl say to Justin Bieber?

Rick: Oh, right.

Dana: But anyway, anyway, anyway, he had written a book called Condemned to Meaning, one of his very early books, and that book was very powerful for me because, in some sense, it explains the entire human condition. If people can understand the import of that one book, we can all hold hands and sing “We Are the World” or whatever.

Because in that book, he begins with a quote from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who once said, “Because we are present to a world, we are condemned to meaning.” What Merleau-Ponty meant by that was that at some point very early on in childhood, or at the beginning of our journey, we realize that there’s me and then there’s you. There’s me and then there’s a world of external objects, people, and events.

What is implicit in that dynamic is the idea, “What is my—excuse me—what is my relationship to that other? What is the relationship of myself to this world of objects, people, and events?” So now there’s the “condemned to meaning” part: Because we will be forced to interact with the world, we’re condemned to wonder about our relationship to it.

As we wonder—and now I’m saying all humans everywhere, always—certain fundamental questions float up in our mind: Who am I? What is this other? What is my relationship to it? Why am I here? Is there a purpose to my existence?

As we start answering those questions, life’s big questions—What is my relationship to the other species? What is my relationship to the planet? What is my relationship to other genders? How many genders are there?—when we ask those questions, then, if we answer those questions, and every human culture has, they suggest a secondary set of questions.

Okay, if I say, “I’m here because a Supreme Being created me,” okay, what is my relationship to this Supreme Being? What is the nature of that Supreme Being? Those secondary and tertiary questions get answered, and all of those answers constellate into a religion, or an ideology, or a philosophy.

As we answer those questions, they can be very useful for a particular human society to find meaning in life and form the ground of a shared ethic in a society. But the problem can be that they also intervene between us and the world of existence, and they can—you know, it’s like…

Rick: They create a filter of a sort.

Dana: Exactly. So it’s like, if—I was going to say, if you’re wearing blue sunglasses, everywhere you look you see blue, so you might accidentally think you live in a blue world, and you don’t realize that, just cutting to the chase, if the world is by default—and this is an analogy—yellow, and we see it through blue sunglasses, it looks green.

But if we’re from Mongolia and we’re raised with a lens of values that are red sunglasses, if you’re following the analogy, then when we look at the yellow world, the world looks orange. People, whether we’re talking about people in a marriage or people in a society relative to another, entirely different society, don’t understand that the way they see the world has an agenda, and that they’re wearing glasses in that sense.

So you can have two people, one from India and one from the United States, and one guy is saying, “Oh, I love the green world,” not realizing he’s seeing it through the blue glasses. And the person from India is saying, “Oh, the world is not green, it’s orange.” And then the person with the blue glasses says, “Hey, I’m looking right at it.” And the Indian says, “I’m looking right at it too. There it is, world!”

I’m going through this quickly, but in Condemned to Meaning, Huston is making a very good point, which is cultural relativity. If you aren’t able to, at some point—even in a friendship—realize, “Okay, I’ve got to listen. I’ve got to stop talking, and I’ve got to listen to what this person is saying, because they’re trying to report the reality of how this looks from their own perspective,” then there’s going to be conflict. There’s going to be conflict.

One reality, many interpretations

Rick: Yeah, and we’re seeing it all over the world today. Do you think that there is some ultimate reality that is what it is, regardless of our perspective on it? Obviously, things like gravity work just fine whether or not we understand them. Photosynthesis, nuclear fusion—all those things have been happening for billions of years without our having any understanding of them.

Even when we had really weird scientific understandings of those things, which were totally wrong, it didn’t alter the way they actually functioned, because they’re not dependent upon our understanding. So, in a larger spiritual sense, do you think that there is a sort of ultimate, universal reality—and I’m getting right back to the perennial philosophy here—which exists independent of anyone understanding it, or to whatever degree of clarity they understand it? Or do you think that reality itself is sort of relative, and that it varies according to the perceiver in question?

Dana: Well, I think the deeper part of what we’re talking about right now, the more significant part of what we’re talking about right now, is that, yes, there’s the sun and there’s the moon and there’s gravity, and there are these things that all people in all cultures can’t deny, because there they are.

Whether you understand the laws of gravity or not, you still weigh whatever you weigh. I weigh about 200 pounds, and then there are consequences of lugging that much weight around and blah, blah, blah. Especially as you…

Rick: Or falling off buildings that you shouldn’t climb in the first place.

Dana: Yeah, but I don’t know why I’m laughing about that. It’s not very funny, actually. But the point is that there’s a qualia level to existence besides the things that confront us as facticities. This is what I’m talking about with the glasses: Human beings still have to interpret the significance of those things they’re confronted with.

And I don’t think nondual experience is an exception to that. I think that the nondual experience, when we bucket it back into the body, when we bring it back into the world of human interaction, then we still have to interpret what the experience is. Do you see what I’m saying?

We have to make sense of the experience first: “What was it that happened to me?” Some people are terrified of the experience who’ve had it. There have been a lot of reports of that.

Rick: I think that’s because, by definition, if the nondual experience is full-blown, it pretty much necessitates the dissolution of the ego, of a personal sense of individuality, at least temporarily. And that can be terrifying, because one feels that everything I thought I was is disappearing here.

Dana: Is gone. And so a new interpretation rises up: “Oh, okay, maybe this is good, that my ego is being set aside and softened up and whatnot.” So the experience has to be interpreted, and then it has to be applied.

If we say, “Well, no, it’s an absolute experience, it’s an unchanging experience,” well, there are relative absolutes in the sense that the sun is there too, every day, day after day. It’ll be there when the planet’s gone, and we have to make sense of those experiences in our relative lives.

Really, what I’m talking about is that in philosophy there’s a category of problems called qualia problems, and they deal with issues of quality. Science deals with quantity, and science can say, “Dana, you weigh exactly 204 pounds.” I know that because I had to go to the doctor yesterday. Nothing serious, my annual checkup. “So you weigh exactly 204 pounds.” Okay, I’m six foot two, so for my height that’s not a lot. “Okay, no reason to lose weight because it isn’t necessarily bad for your health.”

Science can say, “If you weigh the right amount, you’re going to live a long life. You’re going to live longer than if you’re a big, fat guy who smokes cigarettes.” But what science can’t say is that the big, fat guy smoking cigarettes can say, “You know what? I’d rather enjoy my life now in the way I want to than live a long life.” Science can’t tell me I shouldn’t make that qualitative decision. Do you see what I’m saying?

Rick: I do, but my response to that was that science would say that, and the obese guy would say that, but then spirituality, in most of its expressions, might say, “Yeah, but are you really enjoying it?” Is being unhealthy really—are you doing justice, are you honoring the gift of this precious instrument through which you can live the Divine?

Of course, there are big, fat guys who smoke cigarettes who live the Divine, like Nisargadatta, so there are exceptions to every generality.

Dana: But my point is that’s a qualitative judgment on life. And so we’re always going to be in a situation where we have to interpret those experiences. All experience, whatever the experience is, no experience comes with its own interpretation—at least none I’ve ever had—that we put the value on these things in this world of our dialectical relationship of subjects and objects. We will always have to.

I mean, this is why, quite frankly, if we look at people like Rumi and Meister Eckhart, yes, they’re talking about a very similar experience, and yet if we look into the ethics of their behavior, we don’t find a perfect parity. We don’t find them behaving in the same way. I think, I mean, let’s go back to Andrew Harvey and

Mother Meera: they had very different views on being gay and homosexual, about the ethics of whether it was legitimate, correct behavior, correct moral behavior.

I think that’s always going to go on. If it didn’t always go on, I think that we would find maybe less disagreement between Buddhists and Hindus, for example. You know what I’m saying?

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: That you still have these arguments about, “When we experience nondual—this nondual reality, is it the essence of the self or is it the not-self? Is it Atman or is it An-Atman?” Like, okay, now we’re down in this world of interpretation and most efficacious interpretations, and I don’t know if we’ll ever fully be rid of that.

I think that my argument, really, was Huston Smith’s argument, and that is, we don’t need to be rid of it. I mean, I love the mystery of having to live with different interpretations, but open-mindedness is what we need—the ability to be more tolerant of different perspectives, even being willing to celebrate that: “Hey, man, it could be kind of cool to look through red sunglasses. I’m kind of tired of looking through the blue sunglasses all the time.”

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: You know what I’m saying?

Rick: Totally, and my response would be that—pardon? What were you going to say?

Dana: Wouldn’t the world be boring if there was only one way to interpret nondual experience as well as our everyday experience?

Rick: It would be, and I think it would be unnatural if by “natural” we mean what we see God doing, which is just an infinite proliferation of diversity and variety. How interesting would the Amazon rainforest be if there were only one kind of plant and one kind of bird? You know, there’s just tremendous variety.

And I think one way of looking at it is that we can agree, and probably we do agree, that there is a sort of universal, fundamental, ultimate reality, but that we’re all, as instruments of that, as reflectors of that, as tools of the Divine, if you will, each unique. And therefore, probably our perception of that, and at the very least our expression of that, our understanding, our behavior, everything else, is all going to differ slightly from one to the next.

And if we can keep that in mind, then we don’t mind the differences, because we just realize, “Well, I’m just one sense organ of the infinite. The nose has its function, but the ears have a different function, so I’m a nose, this guy’s an ear.” And I guess that’s quite literal in my case.

And yeah, I guess I made the point that spiritual people are always about getting on to the universal value of life. Well, if you’ve really done that, then it begins to percolate into your understanding and behavior, and you become more tolerant and all-embracing of other relative expressions. You don’t feel like mine is the only valid perspective, or the superior perspective, or anything else. You know, we’re all just sense organs of the infinite.

Dana: Well, you know, well said, well said. I think that you interviewed Ken Rinpoche, Lobsang Settin, on your program four or five years ago, and he’s going to be here in Portland in a couple of weeks. And he always points out, if you want to walk comfortably in the world—and he uses this as an analogy—“If I want to walk comfortably on the planet, I can go two ways. I could cover the entire planet Earth with rubber and walk on the Earth barefoot, and I would be comfortable wherever I went. Or I could just put a little bit of rubber on the bottom of each one of my feet, and then everywhere I go, rocky or not, I can comfortably walk.”

And so Tibetan Buddhists believe wisdom always manifests as compassion. If you are getting your own house in order in such a way that you’re exhibiting behavior where you walk more gently on the Earth, then you’re getting somewhere. And I believe that, quite frankly, Rick, you can use that as a legitimate yardstick. Is your behavior becoming more patient? Is your behavior becoming more open-minded? Is your behavior becoming more tolerant? Okay, you’re getting somewhere.

You know, even if you feel like, “Okay, I’m not having this other yardstick of nondual breakthrough and regular nondual experience,” don’t sell yourself short. If you are becoming more patient, that’s something we—the world—really need.

Wisdom always manifests as compassion.

✨ Can awakening be verified?

Rick: Yeah, it does, which brings up a whole other topic of discussion that we could go on about. We sort of touched on it, and that is, what are ultimately the criteria of awakening or enlightenment? Are they externally observable, or is there just some ultimate subjective criteria that only those who have that experience can verify for themselves, whether they’re sitting in a cave or busy in the marketplace?

Dana: I don’t like that one.

Rick: You don’t? Why?

Dana: I’ve spent too much time in India, in too many ashrams and maths, which is what they call monasteries, to feel comfortable with that one. Like, “Oh, you know, if you were as great as me, you would understand how great I am.” Like, “All right.”

Rick: Well, that’s kind of a distortion of it, because a person who is genuinely enlightened probably wouldn’t say that, and yet that wouldn’t— they might not say anything, which actually would probably be a point in their favor.

Dana: Maybe I’m misinterpreting, because one of the things that, as someone who has spent their whole life looking at this scene as it’s grown up—because academically I’m very interested in Westerners who have become interested in Asian religions, like why did they do that? What’s the attraction to all that?—and looking at this situation over time, then it’s interesting to me, certain dynamics.

You’re going to be more successful as a nondual teacher if you’re good-looking. You’re going to be more successful if you’re an extrovert. You’re going to be more successful if you wear a shawl. You’re going to be more successful if you don’t smoke cigarettes. Nisargadatta was wrong about that; he shouldn’t have done that. Did you see what I’m saying?

There are certain profiles that we have conjured—a sage-on-the-stage kind of profile—and I think that people, myself included, if we go to hear a spiritual teacher speak, there could be some old Black guy or some old cleaning lady who’s standing there, who happens to be introverted and happens to be not physically attractive, who actually is having the richer, deeper experience, and we have blind spots around that.

Rick: Sure.

Dana: We don’t—we’ve kind of created a culture around what the great one looks like. That…

You see what I’m saying?

Rick: Yeah, I mean…

Dana: The yardsticks that we’re using to measure greatness have more to do with physical beauty and what we look like in a yoga leotard.

Rick: Well, obviously they shouldn’t, and you remember the verses in the Gita where Arjuna says, “What are the signs of the sage of steady intellect? How does he sit? How does he walk? How does he speak?” He’s asking for external criteria, and Lord Krishna answers him with subjective criteria that wouldn’t be externally observable.

So I don’t think either you or I, or perhaps most of the listeners, think that there’s any kind of correlation between physical attractiveness and shawl-wearing and extroversion—and…

Dana: Well…

Rick: Yeah, obviously the ones who make that kind of impression become more popular usually, but maybe they have to in order to have a teaching role. If they were—well, I hate to attach physical attractiveness to it, but there has to be a certain amount of extroversion anyway for a person to want to get up on a stage and talk.

Dana: Yeah, well, you know, I mean, this is a bigger subject and we don’t need to talk about it; it’s fine with me. But people will often say, “I went to see a concert last night”—you and I are both music lovers—and they’ll say, “I went to see a concert and it was so amazing and it was so beautiful and so wonderful.”

And so I think people recognize they’re getting spiritual teachings through going to a music performance or hearing a symphony. Or, you know, Sri Chinmoy—do you remember Sri Chinmoy? All of his teachings were him playing music and reading poetry and…

Rick: And lifting airplanes or whatever he used to do. He used to do these feats of strength.

Dana: Well, you know, I guess what I’m arguing for is that that nondual experience can be expressed in a wide range of ways, and there’s no reason to say, “I’m going to see a spiritual teacher tonight.”

I guess what I’m saying is if we expand the concept of “spiritual teacher” more broadly, then we can, I don’t know, go see Noam Chomsky and feel like we’re getting “spiritual information.” Why not? Or a rock concert or…

Rick: Yeah, sure, but there we’re kind of—I think we’re going a little bit far afield. I mean, the question was, I’m trying to find…

Dana: What are the criteria?

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: What are the criteria?

Rick: Are there any sort of—can it be made scientific? Are there any sort of repeatable, publicly investigatable criteria for spiritual awakening so that it’s not just left to some person’s subjective account of what they’re experiencing, but others, if they hear that account and get interested, can go follow steps A, B, and C and arrive at the same experience? Is there any verifiability, I’m asking, I guess?

Dana: Yeah, well, you know, this neurophysiology stuff is very interesting. Some people will say, “All right, if I can map the brain state, and I can describe, while you say you’re having this nondual experience, this is the brain state that goes with that, now that I’ve mapped it, that reduces the authenticity of the experience.” Do you understand what I’m saying?

Rick: Yeah. Some people interpret it that way, like, “Oh, you’re just talking about your brain being in a different configuration, and that gave you the illusion of this nondual experience.”

If you reduce it down to thinking that states of consciousness are just epiphenomena of brain functioning, rather than actually being correlates of it, you know what I mean?

That—if you accept that there are, like, for instance, near-death experiences, some people say, “Wow, I really had this experience and I saw my father, and I looked down from the ceiling and saw the surgeons, and the guy was wearing a blue hat,” or whatever. They can identify things. “I saw a pair of sneakers on the balcony outside my hospital window.”

And others would say, “Oh,” you know, they try to dismiss it because it conflicts with their paradigm by saying things like, “Well, you’re just hallucinating because your brain was shutting down and getting deprived of oxygen.”

So when you bring up neurophysiology, it opens up the whole topic of whether there can be neurophysiological correlates to higher states of consciousness, which doesn’t mean that they are only neurophysiological phenomena, but that the brain behaves a certain way when one is experiencing them.

Dana: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: Yeah, not only do I see what you mean, but that was actually my point, which is that there’s a neurophysiological correlate to an experience, as you’re describing it. That doesn’t mean that neurophysiological correlate is creating the experience. For example, if I eat a slice of apple pie, which I’d like to do because it’s lunchtime and I’m hungry.

Rick: I’m going to sit here and starve you to death. I’m sorry, Dan.

Dana: Well, I always enjoy talking with you. If I eat an apple pie, then there will be a neurophysiological correlate of “yummy,” but that doesn’t mean the pie doesn’t exist. It didn’t eliminate the pie because there’s a neurophysiological correlate.

Rick: Right, your brain didn’t create the pie or anything.

Dana: Exactly.

Rick: Your brain just interpreted the experience of the pie in a certain way.

Dana: That’s right. And if there is this non-dual neurophysiological correlate—if there is this neurophysiological correlate of non-dual experience that can be described in a very profound way—then I think that is evidence of, “This is your brain and this is your brain on God,” that there can be some strong evidence. The thing that will always be true, in my estimation, is if by definition we say that reality in its purest form is metaphysical, beyond the physical, then—haven’t you just exempted the absolute from quantification? If you say that what’s most fundamental to reality isn’t a thing, there’s nothing to put under the microscope, there’s nothing to see through the telescope. You can see evidence of its existence, as the neurophysiological correlate of non-dual experience would be. Do you see what I’m saying?

Rick: Yeah. Well, physicists say that what’s fundamental to reality isn’t a thing. They say that, but they can see evidence of it with the Large Hadron Collider or whatever—the Higgs boson and different things. They’re seeing sort of manifest evidence of the unmanifest nature of reality, and that’s what we can see, I think, in the brain. And it would stand to reason that there are neurophysiological correlates to transcendent experience, as there are to any experience—to waking, to dreaming, to sleeping. Each of those has a unique neurophysiological signature. And if transcendental experience is as profound and radically different as it’s cracked up to be, then the brain—if you hooked Ramana Maharshi up to modern instrumentation, you should see a brain that’s functioning quite differently than that of the average person, if you know what to look for.

Dana: Exactly. And I think the empirical part that you can do, if you say, “Well, okay, science will never be able to get a hold or a grasp of that which transcends time and space,” is this: If the mystics of all these esoteric traditions are right—and I believe they are, based on my experience—you are the instrument, you are the microscope, you are the telescope.

Rick: Exactly—that can grok that, that can experience that reality in a way that is… People say, “Well, that was just your subjective experience,” but if somebody says to me, if I say, “Oh, I love my daughters,” and they say, “Oh, that’s just your subjective experience.”

That’s just serotonin or something.

Dana: Yeah, right, right. Okay, get out of the room. But we can have this profound experience that we’re the instrument, and it becomes empirical because—and I love this idea; I think it’s very attractive to the American mind, quite frankly—we place such a sovereignty on my own choice. The teacher says, “Look, okay, you don’t believe that this experience is there, or that this experience is possible. Why don’t you do this practice for a while, and then tell me what… and then let’s have another conversation.”

Rick: Yeah, I love this. This whole line of thinking is right up my alley. And there are all kinds of things that physicists tell us—I’m just taking physics as an example—that I’ll never personally verify because I don’t have the time or the ability to get a PhD and postgraduate work in physics and then get to work at the Large Hadron Collider or something. And yet, these guys who do that, the specialists, so to speak, report back to us that, “Yes, this, that, and the other thing are happening.”

And so, in terms of the spiritual realm, we all have an instrument in our possession that is more sophisticated than the Large Hadron Collider, actually. Even a single cell of it is, and that has the capability of experiencing the transcendent. And so, as you just said, you can tell anyone—you can take the world’s staunchest atheist and say, “All right, fine, hang on to your atheism, but do X, Y, and Z for X number of years,” and it will probably be fewer years than it takes to qualify to run the Large Hadron Collider. And you may very well agree with my perspective, which is that there’s this transcendent reality.

Dana: Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right. You know, there’s a kind of a staunch recalcitrance about, “Well, I don’t want to do that! I don’t want to!” I mean, I’m thinking of certain colleagues of mine that I won’t mention. We’ll have conversations about this at conferences, and I’ll say, “Well, you know, we’re talking entirely on the level of ideas, and let’s not have that concept addiction. Let’s say, okay, if I took you to Paris, would you believe Paris was there?” “Oh yeah, I couldn’t deny it, because there it would be.” “Okay, well, why don’t you try one of these practices, tried-and-true pathways up the mountain, for a while, and then let your own experience get in an argument with your own experience.”

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: I’m not asking you to accept it on the basis of faith.

Rick: That’s why I wonder about Sam Harris in a way, because it seems to me that if his practice is really effective and if he keeps at it—although I guess Buddhists never get to the point where they think God exists—but it seems to me that ultimately one would, if the practice is capable of it, arrive at the sort of recognition that there is this divine intelligence that permeates everything and that, “Oh, that’s what God is, that’s what they’re talking about.” You’d eventually kind of wake up to that.

Dana: Mahayana Buddhists see it that way.

Rick: Do they? Mahayana Buddhists talk about non-dual experience, that there is this something that transcends samsara, you know, that idea.

I think, you know, do you know the Roald Dahl story of—I think it’s The Incredible Story of Henry Sugar or something like that? It actually fits in here, because it’s quite a wonderful story about Henry Sugar. He is a gambler, and he learns about some mystic who can read minds, and so he thinks, “Wow, that would be useful for gambling. I’d be such a good gambler—”

Rick: Right.

Dana: If I could do that.” So he starts doing all these yogic practices and meditation to become this great gambler, but as time goes by and he develops these abilities, he hadn’t anticipated that his heart would also awaken. And so by the time he really perfects these abilities and he wants to go to Las Vegas and cash in on them, he sees it as morally wrong to do that.

Rick: That’s true.

Dana: Yeah, it’s a cool story, great for children.

Rick: Yeah, or adults. So we should probably wrap it up, but I just got a nice email from our friend Craig Holliday. Remember Craig from—

Dana: Oh, sure.

Rick: You met him at SAND.

Dana: Hey, Craig!

Rick: Yeah, he’s been watching. I interviewed him. He said, “I just want to share my love to both of you. Love the interview. It reflected depth, compassion, maturity, and wisdom. So nice to see the fruits of a lifelong dedication to wisdom. I was really touched by your meeting. I think it was a good reminder for all tuned in of the continual and ongoing evolutionary nature of the path, the importance of understanding the difference between states and traits, and the role of the heart, compassion, and social responsibility. Two bright lights in our world. With love, Craig.” Thank you, Craig.

Dana: Yeah, talking about a big heart, what a wonderfully big heart Craig has.

Rick: Great guy.

Dana: Yeah, thanks for sending that in.

Closing thoughts

Rick: Sure. All right, well, unless we want to actually break some kind of a record here in terms of the length of a BATGAP interview, we should probably wrap it up. So let’s do that. People can tell that we really enjoy talking to each other, but we’ll have to do that on our own time sometimes, so as not to totally bore people to death.

Dana: Yeah, I agree with that. I always enjoy talking with you, Rick. Thanks for giving me a call.

Rick: Yeah, me too. And thanks to those who’ve hung in there with us. Of course, if it got boring for you, you hung up, and don’t blame me. But it seems like quite a few people have hung in there, so I’m glad to be able to share our thoughts with you, for what they’re worth.

Dana: Anything that—this is a part of my own Buddhist practice—any part of this that was useful at all for any of us, we should dedicate to the benefit of all sentient beings. It’s a practice in Buddhism to surrender ego and to remember that all beings are trying to grow spiritually, and that whatever benefit has come out of this, we should surrender to them.

Whatever benefit has come out of this, we should surrender to all sentient beings.

Rick: Yeah, and I think we would both agree that as much as we enjoy having conversations like this and dwelling on this kind of topic, ultimately the value of it is that we may in some way be a conduit for greater good to infuse into the world. That’s kind of the way I see my activities. Not that I don’t enjoy them personally—there’s a sort of a personal motivation—but at the same time, the hope is that I’m making the best use of this gift of life to have some kind of beneficial influence on others, on the world.

Dana: That’s the way I see your activities too, Rick. I mean, I think you’re doing a great service. You know, you’ve created a voice where nobody’s captured the flag. You’re listening to lots of people from lots of perspectives and letting people make up their own mind. What a wonderful practice. Kudos to you.

Rick: Well, thanks, and kudos to all the people that I get to talk to, who are my teachers in a sense. Okay, so let me make a few wrap-up points here. As you know by this time, I’ve been talking with Dana Sawyer, and I’ve already read his bio. You know who Dana is and what he does. We’ve been talking about Huston Smith, hopefully enough, but he’s been the inspiration for us to have this conversation, and there’s a lot more to learn about Huston. I’ve really enjoyed reading his book, and those who enjoyed this interview might also enjoy reading it. It’s called Huston Smith, Wisdom Keeper. You can find that on Amazon. I’ll have a link to it on Dana’s BATGAP page, as well as a link to Huston’s website and Dana’s website.

And as I mentioned in the beginning, Dana will be—he’s not a spiritual teacher per se; he doesn’t lead little satsangs and stuff—but he is leading a trip to India in the first two weeks of January with a group of students from his college, and others are welcome to go along, for a fee, of course. A friend of mine who lives in Arizona, who’s a fan of the show, has signed up for it, and there are a certain number of slots for others to do so. So if that interests you, how will they get in touch with you? Through your website, right, Dana?

Dana: They can get in touch with me through my website. It’s the first two weeks of January, not December—the first two weeks of January. And they can also get in touch with me through the main College of Art website.

Rick: Okay, maybe I’ll put up a link to both places

Dana: Great!

Rick: on your site.

Dana: Yeah.

Rick: And just some general points about BATGAP. As most of you know, it’s an ongoing series. There are plenty of previous ones—hundreds, in fact—which you can find categorized under the Past Interviews menu. You can find upcoming ones announced under Future Interviews. There’s a Suggested Guest section there, and there’s a place where you can subscribe to this as an audio podcast, so you don’t have to sit for three hours watching a video. You can listen to it while you commute or something.

There’s the Donate button, a place to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, and a bunch of other things. There’s even a feature where you can download the BATGAP theme song as a ringtone for your phone. So poke around in the menus on Batgap.com, and you’ll find all these things.

So thanks for listening or watching, and thank you, Dana. Thanks, everybody, and we’ll see you next week.

[Music]