Dana Sawyer on Huston Smith Transcript

Dana Sawyer on Huston Smith Interview

Summary:

• Interview with Dana Sawyer, a professor of religion and philosophy, and the author of a biography of Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of world religions.
• Huston Smith’s life and work: The interview covers various aspects of Huston Smith’s life and work, such as his upbringing in China, his friendship with Aldous Huxley, his exploration of different spiritual traditions, his defense of religion against scientism, and his contribution to the perennial philosophy.
• Themes and insights: The interview also discusses some themes and insights that emerge from Huston Smith’s biography, such as the role of intellectualism and experience in spirituality, the value and limitations of exoteric and esoteric religion, the diversity and unity of mystical experiences, and the challenges and opportunities for interfaith dialogue and understanding.
• References: The web page contains many references to other sources, such as books, articles, podcasts, and websites, that are related to the topics of the interview.

Full transcript:

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 and you’ll see several hundred other ones all archived and categorized in various ways. There’s a bunch of other things to explore on the website. And 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. And 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. And 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. And as a matter of fact, he’s going there in December. And if anyone would like to go with him, it’s possible to join in on the little tour that he’s leading of Benares and Rishikesh and places like that in India. And Dana and I have been good friends for 45 years. We first met in about 1971 when I was 21 and he was 19. And 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. Well, 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. And 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. And 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”: That they have realized their true nature. They’ve had some kind of non-dual 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, you know, is that a question? Is that the question you’re asking?

Rick: It kind of is, yeah. I mean, you know, 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, he didn’t claim to be enlightened,” you know, and so on and so forth. So, why are we making such a fuss over him? And 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 I, 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, and that we’re trying to defend the non-dual experience, that we’re trying to…both of us have had careers in which we’ve tried to legitimate the validity of non-dual experience and mystical states of consciousness, and where 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: And I would also say that you and Huston both are not only academics, but you have been experientially motivated all of your lives. You know, you’ve ardently sought that which you have also – you have ardently sought the experience of that which you have also attempted to understand and articulate.

Dana: Exactly, exactly.

Rick: Yeah, 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, this and that, all that, it just keeps you hung up, 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, and so some people process their life through their emotions, some people process their life through thinking, some people are extroverted, some people are introverted. And so people who predominantly, or I should say, their dominant, is that they enjoy processing ideas, they enjoy working through intellectual arguments, it’s a natural tendency for them. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have other …many , I mean, I have feelings, I have a spiritual life. And also, I think that it’s also discounting a phenomenon I experience regularly, and I predict a lot of your listeners have, which is you’re reading a book, and it’s 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.

Rick: Also, we might add that in Hindu tradition you have Jnanis, Jnana Yoga and so on, and you have towering intellects like Shankara and Sri Aurobindo and others, 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, and you have similar things in the Buddhist tradition. So, in the – if you respect those traditions then you probably don’t have a problem with those who are more intellectually inclined, you know, 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 those guys where they’re 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. And 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 Sramana philosophers in the 6th century, 5th century BC were coming and sitting down near them in the forest ashrams, and a lot of what they had to say was extremely cerebral and yeah, philosophical.

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

Dana: Yeah, you know, saying that, I mean, I’m not at the same time denying that there’s such a thing as concept addiction

Rick: Yeah

Dana: and that people don’t get caught up in their heads and get caught up in their philosophical truths. I mean, I think one of the things postmodern philosophy today 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 of the old philosophical way of looking at the world. That – we tend to be too dogmatic about any particular system and need some liberation from that. You know, 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. So 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.

Rick: Yeah

Dana: That experiential knowing trumps all other, you know.

Rick: Yeah, 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 after, 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 10 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, well basically that only that which science can measure is valid, and he was always up against this academic disdain for mysticism and metaphysics. So I bring that point up because we were just talking about whether intellectualism can be a barrier to spiritual experience, and 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: Yeah, I couldn’t say it better, I mean you’re exactly right. I think that the problem Huston encountered, which is a problem that I still encounter at academic conferences, is a dogmatic materialism, that there is a dogmatic materialism that we bump into. You know, Dawkins is a good example of that, I think Sam Harris is a good example of that today, several other people who … you know, that’s what was going on at MIT, is this sort of exclusive focus on quantification, because you can’t quantify these experiences perfectly, though neurophysiology is lending strong evidential support. Then okay, it doesn’t exist, if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t exist. You know, 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, and you know, science is a relatively new thing, and who knows what we might have a thousand years from now, or two thousand years, or what they might have had a thousand or two thousand years before 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, you know, I mean if you look at “Beyond the Postmodern Mind” by Huston Smith, you see a lot of his arguments against Scientism. You know, 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 20th century the most dangerous ideologies were Nazi Germany, were Mao’s communism, were Stalin’s communism, and so those were secular ideologies. And 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.” You know, that would be his way of looking at that.

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 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, and I’m sure that’s a broad generalization and there’s some crossover and mixture. But the exoterics, those who are sort of, have a sort of outward orientation, kind of need the structure and discipline and ritual and rules and regulations that religions provide, and so it’s not like that stuff is necessarily an obstacle to realization, it’s a … it has, it serves a purpose for those who need it. And 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 that. He really did feel like, you know, he totally felt that spiritual experiences were legitimate, he was an endorser of the non-dual experience, he called it the “unitive experience,” whereas 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 traditions, wisdom traditions, they tended to break through into a very similar kind of consciousness, and when they would describe it, whether we’re talking about the poetry of Rumi or the philosophy of Shankara or the writings of the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, that 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, where 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, etc.” And two things there, two things. First of all, there…in the academic study of religion, many people will look at, “Well, what are the underlying structures of various religions,” like for instance, family structures and how they’re shaped by the ideologies of religion. So social anthropologists would be doing that kind of work, for example, and there are people that look at the functions of those structures. So 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 down East 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. And so again, community and identity are important functions of religion, and there are others that we could cover. And so Huston felt like, “You’re making a mistake, Aldous, when you say we just need to get rid of the exoteric level of religion.” Yeah, we shouldn’t be dogmatic about our particular communities and our particular identities and 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. And 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, “Janice Joplin used to say, ‘I make love to 2,000 people every night, and then I go home alone.’ And Cousineau said, ‘Maybe if she had had more community, that she would have lived past 26 or whatever the age was.”

Rick: 27.

Dana: 27.

Rick: Yeah, so she and Hendricks 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 is that the exoteric level of religion has a lot of values that sociologists can put a premium on, psychologists can put a premium on, whether intellectuals like Huxley, esoterics like Huxley do or not. And then Huston would also say, Huxley was discounting that those are established trails up the spiritual mountain. That 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 that it’s a traditional mantra japa, mantra repetition practice of the Shankara lineage and has been around for 11 centuries. So a lot of these practices, you know, Zen meditation and shamatha, Tibetan Buddhist practice I have a lot of experience with, these aren’t things that we should poo-poo. They’re…You can bushwhack your way up the spiritual mountain, but to do some of these traditional practices can be very, very, very efficacious. Now what people can do, and you know, if my coffee is making me blab too much, just pipe up here, but what people can do is they can sacralize the trail, and I think we talked about that in our first interview together. They can confuse a means for an ends 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, that it’s really about these practices. I’m sacralizing the practices themselves, and that’s a danger because, well 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 and others may not know, but one of the ways in which we were indoctrinated in that training was that religions are sort of the somewhat degenerated remnants of the coming on earth of a great sage, 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, you know, knowledge crumbled on the hard rocks of ignorance and things got distorted and diluted and so on and so forth, until you know, we have what we have today in terms of the various religions. And you know, Maharishi wasn’t saying that we should do away with them all, he was saying if we can kind of bring in the transcendent then we’ll restore the original purpose of religions and we’ll breathe life into existing religions. And 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, is 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. And I think, you know, that’s part of what your work is about and my work is about, is 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, it’s like there’s a part of them inside that they can intuit is there, but they really don’t have access to. 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. And, you know, I think that’s what a place like Esalen is, for example, is a Hogwarts for adults, a place where people can go and learn how to make contact with the – with that part of them that they profoundly long for.

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 a stepping stone to ultimate fulfillment in the Divine ground, I think was the word used. Go ahead and comment on that and then I have another question.

Dana: Well, you know, 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. And 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, equal 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, 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 like it’s not uncommon, and that’s an extreme example, for people to live their lives. They’re 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 T-Loss, 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, is there is some curative value for our society. You know, as Jung and many others have argued inside the discipline of psychology, that 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. And a minute ago we were talking about the fact that religions do have value, at least potentially, and the … 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, they hear some nice songs sung, and they hear 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, you know, and it was like totally boring, I had no idea what was going on, I hated doing it. I would rather be outside playing baseball, and because I had no concept of any kind of transcendental reality and nothing that I saw, and I also went to 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, and do they have the means of providing it, or would they have to sort of turn to other sources which have more or less specialized in providing it? For instance, Thomas Merton went to India, and Father Keating learned TM and then kind of molded it into the Centering Prayer, and perhaps found roots for the 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 kind of some cross-fertilization from other traditions which have been a little bit more clear 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. And what came across to Huston is that we’re in good hands, that God loves us and all of this. And what came through to him from his mother was that he should respect the indigenous religions of China. She had…also was born and raised in China and could speak fluent Mandarin, as can Huston Smith, and so she had a lot of respect for Chinese culture and from the… from childhood 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 an old-school, express your Christianity primarily through Christian love. For instance, his father, when he got to Suzhou, where their mission was, the first thing he built was a hospital, and 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…was that Huston came to believe something that maybe you experienced when you were in church, which was that he 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. And what he came to theorize was that, as the Bhagavad Gita says, there are basically spiritual personality types, that 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. And 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, and 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.” Well, Huston Smith would say that’s karma yoga as described in the Bhagavad Gita, that when we’re in service to humanity and the planets and other beings on it through our actions, Red Cross volunteers in the third world, that that is a spiritual path. And so there are those four major spiritual paths described in the Bhagavad Gita, and Huston will 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.

Rick: Yeah, I think …

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

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? And 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 anymore than I already…because I had my own sort of church by meditating, but I didn’t feel the need so much for the outer structure of that anyway, the Christian outer structure. Although, as you know, many, many people do, they’ll go off on a spiritual quest and then they’ll come back to Judaism or Christianity or something and integrate that into their…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, etc., those are strong attractors for some personality types.

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

Dana: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, alright, let’s keep going. I’ve got lots of notes and you sent me some questions, and 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.

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 thing for people, it’s a good term for people to understand.

Dana: 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, and when he was traveling with his wife he was also traveling with a guy named Gerald Heard, who’s a very interesting figure. Take a while to really explain Gerald, but he’s in the book. Gerald was interested in mysticism, and got Huxley interested in mysticism and 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. And 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 to 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 a spirituality. So people in all traditions, as they self-actualize, move further into their awakening, wake up into the reality of this singular spiritual tradition. Anyway, Huxley being…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.” So what he did is he read all of the mystical literature he could get his hands on from the established traditions, and 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.” And so he’s saying that all mystics are basically, or fundamentally, making three points…four points. One is that there is, in addition to this physical universe, a transcendent aspect beyond time and space, that all mystics are saying this, there’s an absolute. And this absolute transcendent reality, point number two, is also imminent 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. And the analogy I use for that is it’s like an ocean, the one ocean manifests at the surface level as waves. And the waves are multiple and many, but they’re not anything separate from 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’s 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 you know, Huxley would totally agree with that. And then the third point of the minimum working hypothesis is that human beings can actually experience reality that way, that 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. And so human beings, the mystics claim, can actually experience that transcendent aspect that they share in common with all of reality. And then 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, that’s 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. So 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 which 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 19th century German idealist philosopher. I recommend Schelling, by the way, to folks out there that are watching this podcast. And 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. There’s in animistic religions, there are gods of mountains, like Mount Fuji in Japan. There are gods of trees and rivers, naiads and dryads, that here a god, there a god, everywhere a god, god, god is everywhere. And 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, that 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.” And so that plays into this. But then there’s what Schelling and others have … it’s a viewpoint that’s termed evolutionary panentheism. And what that means is that in the physical…on the physical level of being, reality… later on, you know, people like Pierre de Chardin, post-Darwin, are saying, “When we look at physical evolution of species from a Darwin perspective, then evolutionary panentheists would say 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. And in a sense, well, not in a sense, but in actuality, for Schelling, this was the idea that we’re…that we’re God’s eyes and God’s fingertips on some level, that 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, and to act most enlightened…in a most enlightened fashion, we need to fully self-actualize, plug into the source of our awakening, which is God/the Absolute/the ocean.

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 is that 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, and if Jesus lived only 33 years, was he on tour? You know, 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, you know, one thing I think that’s important is that when Huston takes up that piece of esoteric religion, one thing he often will point out is that we can say, “Okay, Rumi has these mystical experiences, Shankara has them, etc., etc., etc. Buddhists have luminaries like Akshobhya or somebody, but what about the average person?” And he believes, and I believe too, that all people have these experiences. They may not know necessarily how to interpret them relative to what we’re talking about today, but the experience is there and they may…they place a value on it. I gave a workshop …

Rick: Well, Gallup has done surveys about this sort of thing, and large percentages of the population claim to have had mystical experiences of some sort.

Dana: I did a workshop down at my friend Alex Gray, the painter Alex Gray’s facility down in New York last spring, and 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.” And one woman raised her hand and she 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, and she couldn’t understand what was happening to her, but that experience, periodically, with some regularity, keeps floating up in her mind as significant. And 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 where I have a busy, high-powered Job, but I didn’t care about it. I didn’t care about the future, I didn’t care about the past. I just felt like everything was okay, and I can’t explain it. It just was a sense of the eternal and timeless.” Well, you know, 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. And for the woman, you were feeling that level of being where everything is profoundly interconnected because on the most profoundest 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 aura, rainbow-colored aura are 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, because if the world, if the universe is nothing but the Divine and just appearing as form, then we’re just sort of swimming in the ocean of the Divine. Like there’s that old saying, the absurdity of a fish being thirsty in water and looking for the 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 so…relatively commonplace. And in my experience doing this show, they’re becoming more so all the time. They’re…it just seems to be spreading like an epidemic, and people are waking up whether or not they’re even looking for it. And 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 say, “Oh, I’m going to put these people up on a pedestal because they’re so unusual,” that if it is happening more common and if 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 really first immigrated on 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,” then as structures come up, then 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. And so, as people are attracted to those structures, then they start to create dogmas and they start to become gatekeepers in religions that really, from Huxley’s perspective, were preventing awakening more than creating it. And 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 on handing out any kind of authority to their followers, that, “Oh, I’ll still be the great one who tells you what to do and when to do it,” and you see what I’m saying.

Rick: Oh yeah, I mean it made them nervous. I mean, 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 that way and feel that way, and Maharishi had this little meeting with him and 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.” And I just happened to know those stories because I was in the TM movement, but I bet you 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 and here is this guy from India, and he’s got on Sadhu orange and he’s got a tilak on his forehead that identifies him as a Vaisnava and long black hair, and I never miss an opportunity to speak Hindi, so I walked up to him and I said, “Abhigahasa, where are you from?” And so he lights up because somebody speaks his language and we start having this conversation. Well a moment or two later, several of his Western devotees in Krishna-garb are now surrounding us and in those moments I could see his demeanor and attitude change, that there was a certain Discomfort. They felt that they didn’t know what we were talking about, and that there was an energy toward me, “How can you just chit-chat with the Great One?” And so he also started to buy into it a little bit, where before he was very congenial I could see him sort of shift into “I’m the Great One” mode, even in his conversation. And so, these structures are there.

Rick: There’s a mutual feedback loop with that kind of thing, you know, 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’s got to be yes and no. But anyway, you know, for Americans where there’s this idea of kind of the sovereignty of individual choice, or there used to be. You know, Phil Goldberg, our friend, said in “American Veda,” there was such an interesting irony in the 1960s of 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 you know, once burned, twice shy, and I think increasingly, and increasingly because of what you say, Rick, about the experiencing being recognized more often, and more people having a richer, fuller version of the experience, that we’re seeing a more 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, that, yeah, 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 kind of be thrown back upon your own understanding sort of 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. And you can’t always ask the guru what you think, or what you should think. And when you’re dealing with four or five, then they will inevitably disagree with each other. So you will have… I mean, you know, you recently interviewed Andrew Harvey, and Andrew and I have talked about this, that when he split from Mother Meera, that was a great moment of insight and self-actualization for him, is that he never…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. You said, I hope I’m quoting you properly here, you said, “Unity can’t be maintained …” well, I guess Huston was saying this, and I tended to disagree with it, but “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.”

Dana: Hmm, hmm. You know, do you want to say something more about that?

Rick: No, you go ahead.

Dana: Okay. Well, you know, two things that 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, it’s informing your life, like the person who had the timelessness walking on the beach with their dog, let it keep informing you. And 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, that you’re intelligent, but you’re not probably I can safely say anybody listening to this is not as intelligent as was Aldous Huxley on that one spectrum of IQ kind of intelligence. Which is a …

Rick: Nor are they as good a piano player as Chopin, or as good a baseball player as Babe Ruth. or, we all…there are always going to be limitations on the relative level.

Dana: Exactly, exactly. And even in terms of the incorporation of the non-dual experience into one’s life, that 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 on.

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…we can pursue this angle that you just brought up. Let me ask you a short, forward question. Why is Huston important?

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. That in the 1940s and 50s, when he was first finishing grad school and then teaching, it was typical in colleges and universities that you really could only teach religion if you hated it. That modernists agreed with Marx that religion was the opiate of the … of the masses, or with Freud that religion is based on an infantile model, where 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 and pray to and ask help from.

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. Our first conscious experiences, we experience no separation between self and other, and so we long to go back into the womb, that idea. And so Freud said, “Hey, stop going to church, start coming to see me and get some therapy around this.” So anyway, 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.” And so along comes Huston Smith and he 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?” I mean, you know, there’s been bad music, music professors aren’t obligated to only play the bad music. And so 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,” you know, he was first teaching primarily at MIT, taught in Denver before that, well, Washington University even earlier, “Why don’t I…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?” And so that’s what he did, you know, when he wrote “The Religions of Man” back in the be some kind of weird schizophrenic guy, because as they changed chapters it was almost like he changed religions, that 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, that he didn’t have a particular axe to grind or viewpoint to defend or impose upon others, and that made him capable of appreciating all the different traditions and religions, because it made him capable of approaching them respectfully.

Dana: I think that’s exactly right, I think that’s exactly right. He, in my experience, has always been a very humble person. He himself says that he never had any great, profound, new insights, that he really has Been…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 a various set 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. You know, two thoughts that come to my mind, one is when I was talking, 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, you know, there was that deep desire to present the religions, 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.

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, 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 out 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 Mullas.”

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: Yeah, and so he did that. And 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 would, he went to Japan to study Zen Buddhism at Myosinji.

Rick: Yeah, there was this point in the book where he was in this Zen monastery on a retreat and for like 8 hours a day he had to sit in lotus or some such position, contemplating if so-and-so says that a dog has…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 8 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 I mean 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, the 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.

Dana: Okay, we won’t forget Timothy Leary.

Rick: Yeah, that Huston felt like when he was studying each one of these religions that 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, but that as he did apprentice in each one of these traditions, then 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 non-dual experience.

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

Rick: Yeah, yeah. I mean I think there are several people that 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 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 so – not only it’s just so darn much fun to talk about, but there were so many relevant – there was so much relevant information in there relative to not only Huston’s journey, but the journey of a lot of people in our age group who lived through the 60s and experimented with psychedelics and all that. So Huxley had written The Doors of Perception back in 1954, 1955, and it covered his experiences with mescaline, and what had happened was there was a man named Humphrey Osmond up in Saskatchewan who was a psychiatrist and he was working with mental patients and they were using mescaline as part of a treatment program. Well those people started to report that they were having what seemed like mystical experiences. Humphrey Osmond didn’t know anything about mysticism, but he had read Aldous Huxley’s book The Perennial Philosophy, 1945, in which he 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 patient’s experience.” So he sent some letters to Aldous and they started a correspondence. Aldous said, “Maybe I would recognize it as 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, and so he brought some mescaline with him, and so Aldous Huxley tried mescaline in 1954. And 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 non-dual consciousness, of the beatific vision, and that’s what he wrote about in The Doors to 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. I mean, she injected him twice actually, and Timothy Leary had brought the substance to them while they were there. So, I mean, I’ve always thought what an extraordinary experience to go directly from waking state consciousness to dead, 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, he…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. And he said he learned more about psychology in four hours on this substance than he had learned in his entire PhD program. Well anyway, he wanted to create a research program at Harvard using psilocybin, which eventually became called the Harvard Psychedelic Project, and again, it wasn’t illegal at that time. Well, in the same way, people who were being given the substance – volunteers who were being given the substance – they had to fill out these elaborate questionnaires afterward. They seemed to be describing mystical experiences. So Leary got ahold of Huxley, he 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 a hold of Huston and said, “Would you look at these reports, these questionnaires?” And so that’s exactly what happened. Huston looked at him, was inspired by them, and went the experiential route that Huxley had gone. He got Timothy Leary to give him some psilocybin. Joined the project.

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. And 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 and greater quantities of drugs and all sorts of things. I think there’s a cautionary note here…for…, since we’re talking about hallucinogens in a rather, in a way that might almost seem to recommend them, there’s a cautionary note that 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’s other methods, I would say. You and I both did them, and they were eye-openers, but hopefully we hung up the phone.

Dana: Well, you know, on the “should we 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 towards, much later in his life, peyote in Mazatlan. So you can’t just sort of generalize anything. But…

Dana: But you know, I totally agree with you, Rick, on 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. And when it came Huston’s time 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, that you’re and 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 sort of 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, but, fine, it’s not good to just sort of swallow the status quo and just accept it because things do need to change, but there is, there are constructive and destructive ways of changing.

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

Rick: Yeah, I mean that was one of the themes of the 60s, do we tear everything down, and 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 those who wanted to kind of just shift the direction and the momentum in a more evolutionary way.

Dana: Right, right. And Huston was more that, like what ended up happening was they eventually, as most people listening to this probably know, Leary and Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass, were were kicked out of Harvard and 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 was Alan Watts and a whole group of really forward-thinking people that I respect. But when Leary made the new basis of it, Millbrook in upstate New York, 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’d take 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…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 just 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 just not a lot of structure or necessarily oversight, and there…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…sexual exploitation and things going on. So it’s just safety first, you know, I mean that’s what I’m kind of leading to, is that you can’t necessarily crash the gates of heaven, a pill isn’t going to give you a vision of God. There’s…there’s kind of a…It’s a long-term project, and it takes a great deal of seriousness and spiritual maturity and dedication and so on, to really culture the kind of life that Huston cultured. It’s not…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. And there are many aspects to awakening, and as Ken Wilber says, it’s not just about waking up, it’s about growing up, it’s about cleaning up. Full spiritual maturity is more than just non-dual experience. And that, on the other hand, I don’t want to be a buzz kill, there is value in those experiences, I would argue. It’s just when you…what am I trying to say? Back in the 60s, so many of us were whoring after the infinite, and personal experience of the infinite, and putting such a profound premium on that. We still see that working its way through our culture today, that people, they want that experience of the transcendent. And 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. And 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, environmental issues, I mean, do we need a lot of people who are having non-dual experience walking on a planet that’s overheated to the point where we can’t exist here anymore? That sooner or later, the rubber has to meet the road. I mean, 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,” is I think what I’m trying to say, is that don’t say, “Oh, I’ll do all that other stuff once I’ve reached perfect, non-dual continuous experience,” that the world needs us right now. We need to … we need to…we’re beings that have bodies that live in a world of material parameters and people need our help.

Rick: yeah

Dana: And that was what bothered Huston about Leary, is that 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 or what people are now doing with ayahuasca or whether they’re engaged in some meditation thing 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?

Dana: Right

Rick: How are your relationships, your friendships? What do you…What’s the quality of your life? The proof of the pudding is in the … well, you should know them by their fruits, I guess. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. You can kind of … a spiritual practice of any nature, chemical or meditational or whatever, should…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…you see it in some people’s even description of their experience, like, “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.” And then they report that, “When I leave the campus of whatever retreat center after a week,” they have a kind of noetic tan, they have kind of an afterglow of that that lasts a few days. But then very quickly they feel like they want to run back inside the retreat center. And…and 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.” That…and there are no true enemies in Buddhism, but the idea is those that piss us off or those that push on us in a way that compromises our ability to be centered, those are the ones we have the most to learn from. Those are the ones that can teach us patience. Those are the ones who can…can show us where we still have work to do on the emotional level and getting 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, that he has no hatred toward them. You know, 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 to Huston’s, and 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. And 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 with…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, who’s a leader in the Hare Krishna movement. He feeds 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. And 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 a 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, compassion, wake up. And also that actually engaging in activities like that can be a spiritual practice in and of themselves. They can kind of attenuate the ego, and get one’s attention off of oneself and onto the other. And 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?” And he didn’t even care. He was so into it and wanting to help the suffering people that he wasn’t even thinking of himself anymore.

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

Rick: Yeah, exactly.

Dana: Like you said, the ego isn’t there. What a wonderful person he is,

Rick: Yeah

Dana: 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, growing-up work are more likely to move in that particular direction. I mean, you know, I’m thinking of Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. They actually expressed some mild anger towards the various gurus and paramparas, lineages of saints in India, that there was…that they so rarely did anything that was social activism. And if you look at the Ramakrishna movement, that’s one of the things they pride themselves on is how much social outreach they do. And I think a lot of the tendencies among Hari Krishnas and others in India today to start their own outreach movements, social welfare movements, was inspired by the work of the Ramakrishna order.

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

Rick: 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. That… that yeah, you know, from a God’s eye view of reality, everything is always alright, capital A, capital R That 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? That ignorance and suffering should be attacked from all sides, and…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 a big one on dealing with each level appropriately, not confusing levels. You know, if you have an infected toe, go to the doctor or something, don’t just say it’s an illusory toe.

Dana: Well, you know, even you and I, if we say and we agree, 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…of eyes. And 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. That okay, 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 you know, the way some people talk, it doesn’t seem obvious to them anyway. But…and given what you just said, you know, I don’t, I mean to take absurd examples, I don’t drive my car into a bridge because the bridge and my car are one. I don’t…

Dana: Right

Rick: there’s 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, you know, they’re suffering and something, 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, and 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…that 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…and the reason…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 that it’s without that deeper awakening, there’s a kind of a foundation missing for really changing the consciousness…the consciousness that gives rise to the problems in the first place, reminiscent of that quote that Einstein is famous for. So anyway, would Huston have agreed with that?

Dana: Definitely, definitely, definitely. I mean that was his whole career, was recapturing that…recapturing that voice of the ancients that told us that we need to embrace the transcendent aspect, the metaphysical aspect of what we are. But you know, 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. That…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 you know, 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…as these problems of global warming continue and exacerbate? Then it’s on us…to… 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 sort of a delicate eco-structure that we depend for our very existence on.

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… 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?” And it was basically saying, “Should there be environmental laws and environmental rights of 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 is…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, you know, 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 in…who’s back only very recently from Afghanistan and he has a service dog and he gets very nervous, and he gets very upset, this veteran. And 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. And the peace that the service dog is experiencing, he can plug into that and use it as a touchstone and a resource. And 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. But 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. So getting back to Huston one more time, what is…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…a couple of points I would say. One is, and this relates to something you said earlier, Rick, about how people in a particular religion can confuse a means for an end, and 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 them the “exclusivists,” because they’re saying, “My religion is right and all the rest of you are stupid and deluded. I’m a…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. And then there are also people, Huston points out, that are “inclusivists.” And “inclusivists” can mean “well” but do “wrong,” and what he meant by that is, some people believe all the religions are really saying the same thing, that all the different religions are really giving one message, and they try to conflate those religions or homogenize them or distill them into one particular viewpoint, whatever it is, some form of universalism. And Huston felt that’s wrong. Like 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 that, would Jews believe 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. So there are exclusivists and there are inclusivists, but Huston was giving this third choice of saying 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 relative to their own populations, their own economic and environmental settings, their own languages. Their…those exoteric forms have tremendous value and function in those societies, but also recognizing that there’s this esoteric level where we should recognize that their mystics very often reveal a pattern of similarity. And so that’s one thing I think if people read the biography of Huston Smith, and they 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.”

Dana: Yeah, you know, 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. That 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, you know, I wish they would. I wish they would be that experienced, but at the same time, and as I said, there’s a value in the religions even on the exoteric level. So there’s one piece of Huston’s message, is that third choice in religion. And then another thing that always…that 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. You know, I’ve met some movie stars, 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, what…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,” and what Merleau-Ponty meant by that was at some point very early on in childhood or 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 and people and events, and then what is implicit in that dynamic is the idea, “What is my…excuse me…what is my relationship to that other? What is my…the relationship of myself to this world of objects, people, and events?” And so now there’s the “condemned to meaning” part, is that because we will be forced to interact with the world, then we’re condemned to wonder about our relationship to it. As we wonder … and now I’m saying, all humans everywhere always, then 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, those 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 … then 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. And as we answer those questions, they can be very useful for a particular human society to find meaning in life, and form a grounds of a shared ethic in a society. But the problem can be that they also intermediate 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. And people, whether we’re talking about in a marriage or we’re talking about people in a society relative to another entirely different society, they don’t understand the way they see the world is got an agenda, and that they’re wearing glasses in that sense. So that…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 they’re 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!” And I’m going through this quickly, but in “Condemned to Meaning” Huston is making a very good point, which is cultural relativity, that if you…if you aren’t able to at some point realize, even in a friendship, that 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.

Rick: Yeah And we’re seeing it all over the world today.

Rick: Do you think that there is some ultimate reality that is what it is, regardless of our perspective on it? That it…obviously, just things like gravity work just fine, whether or not we understand them, you know, photosynthesis, nuclear fusion, all those things have been happening for billions of years without our having any understanding of it, and even when we had really weird scientific understandings of those things which were…which were totally wrong, it didn’t alter the way they actually function, 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 … to whatever degree of clarity understanding 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 culture can’t deny, because there they are. You know, whether you understand the laws of gravity or not, you still weigh whatever you weigh, I weigh about 200 pounds, and then there’s 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 …

Rick: Dana broke his leg falling off a building because he was into climbing, so anyway, he paid for it.

Dana: There’s a qualia level to existence besides the things that confront us as facticities, that… and this is what I’m talking about with the glasses, is that human beings still have to interpret the significance of those things they’re confronted with. And I don’t think non-dual experience is an exception to that. I think that the non-dual experience, when we…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 non-dual 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, is that, “Oh, okay, maybe this is good that my ego is being set aside and softened up and whatnot.” And then so the experience has to be interpreted and then it has to be applied. So 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. I mean, really what I’m talking about is in philosophy there’s a category of problems that are called qualia problems, and they deal with issues of quality. So 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.” Well, okay, science can say, “If Dana…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, 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.” Okay, 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, the obese guy would say that, but then spirituality in most of its expressions might say, “Yeah, but are you really enjoying it?” And 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, that 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 we look at Meister Eckhart, yes, they’re talking about this 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, that 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 non-dual 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 non-dual 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 a 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, we’re each unique. And therefore, our 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 ears.” And I guess that’s quite literal in my case. And yeah, I guess I made the point that if you really … 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 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 doing your…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, that you can actually use that as … 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 don’t…I’m not having this other yardstick of non-dual breakthrough and regular non-dual experience,” don’t sell yourself short. If you are…if you are becoming more patient, that’s something we…the world really needs.

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…sort 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, like you’re going to be more successful as a non-dual 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, shouldn’t have done that. Did you see what I’m saying? That there are certain profiles that we have conjured … a sage on the stage kind of profile, and I think that…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, they happen to be not attractive physically, 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…

Dana: 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 goes…answers him with subjective criteria that wouldn’t be externally observable. So I don’t…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? Like he used…all of his teachings were him playing music and him 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 non-dual 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 like, 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. That…some people will say, “All right, if I can map the brain state, and I can describe, while you say you’re having this non-dual 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 was in a different configuration and that gave you the illusion of this non-dual experience.” That…

Rick: If you reduce it down to thinking that states of consciousness are just epiphenomenon of brain functioning, rather than actually being correlates of it, you know what I mean? That…If you accept that there’s … 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, you know, can there 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…that there’s a neurophysiological correlate to an experience, as you’re describing it. Doesn’t mean that neurophysiological correlate is creating the experience. Like 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…if there is this non-dual neurophysiological…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,”

Rick: Yeah

Dana: that there…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 there will … haven’t you just exempted the absolute from quantification? If you say that…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 in the…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,” but if the mystics of all these esoteric traditions are right … and I believe they are, based on my experience … that you…you can…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.”

Rick: 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 you know, 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 … that 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, you know, 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, “Alright, 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 that we’ll have conversations about this at conferences and they’ll… 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, you know, 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, one would 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 know, 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 is a gambler and he learns about some mystic who can read minds, and so he thinks, “Wow, that would be useful for gambling, you know, 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.

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 kind of 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 for those who’ve hung in there with us. Of course, if it’s got boring for you, you hung up and don’t blame me, but it seems like some quite a few people have hung in there, so 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 say, to remember that all beings are trying to grow spiritually, and that whatever benefit has come out of this we should surrender to them.

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 know, you’re listening to lots of people from lots of perspectives and letting people make up their own mind, and 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. So 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, 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, and 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 like have, you know, lead little satsangs and stuff, but he is leading a trip to India in December, first two weeks of December, 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, they can 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, 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, it’s, as most of you know, it’s an ongoing series, there are plenty of previous ones, hundreds, you can find them categorized under the past interviews menu, you can find upcoming ones announced on the upcoming interviews thing, which is under future interviews, there’s a suggested guest thing there, 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, there’s a place to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, and a bunch of other things. There’s even a thing 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, so thanks everybody, and we’ll see you next week.