"Are there any boundaries?" America's most reknowned authority on religion, and author of Why Religion Matters, expounds his views on why religion does matter in the context of historical progress, personal perspective, and New Age thought.

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The Monthly Aspectarian: Dr. Smith, the scope of your work is so wide that there isn't any way to address all of it within the context of a conversation like this. Would you give us your general overview of the New Age Movement, and what your take is on the New Age?

Huston Smith: The New Age has no clear boundary because it's not organized. It's more a point of view, so every New Ager is going to have his or her own definition of what it means. Despite the amorphousness of the word, I think I would characterize as its chief belief the view that we are entering a new age in history, which has been called "the Aquarian Age." Ken Wilber, who may be the most erudite and vocal shaper of new age thought, puts it not quite this bluntly--that we are about to enter a mutation in human consciousness to a higher level of understanding.

TMA: I'm curious if you're aware that the ages themselves are attached to an astrological cycle called the precession of the equinoxes.

HS: I think that astrology enters into new age thinking, crediting great importance to planetary influences, so if you're asking am I aware of its ties to astrology, yes.

TMA: I find that the religions of the various ages have common threads that run through them. The religions of Pisces, for instance, the age that we're coming out of, all share the common theme of surrender. In Christianity, you have "not my will, but Thine be done;" in Islam, it's submission to the will of Allah; in Buddhism, it's the giving up of the self to the void. Surrender is the common thread that runs through them all.

HS: You are correct. Do you also take into account that the word "surrender" has a positive and a negative meaning? The negative meaning is to sort of submit to authority and surrender to your victors in time of war, so I think that in our general thinking, surrender is not a good word. But in all of these traditions, which do have this component, they turn it around and say it is a virtue. William James has the best statement on that that I know and you will find it under his name in the index of Why Religion Matters. Kafka put it in an aphorism. "In your struggle with the world, bet on the world." That says it very nicely because, for starters, it's bigger than you are. James doesn't quote that, but he spells out that it's going to win. If you can't surrender gracefully--and, more than that, positively enjoying the implications of surrender--why, you're going to lose.

TMA: If we have this theme of surrender for the age of Pisces religions, then what I see emerging as a theme for the Aquarian age is self-responsibility.

HS: That's ambiguous to me because it can mean that the self will take responsibility for itself or it could mean take responsibility only for itself and not for the welfare of society. Responsibility could be narcissistic, or it could be altruistic.

TMA: In the same way that in Pisces, surrender could go either way.

HS: So you give a positive reading to the phrase "self-responsibility" or responsibility to the self?

TMA: Right. Responsibility for our own religious and spiritual life as opposed to listening to authority.

HS: Alright. Now it can take the positive meaning, namely, I'm not going to let either God do it for me or blame my parents for doing it wrong, I'm going to assume responsibility for my life ... that's a virtue, a good feature of the New Age. What I run into, which I don't like, is their assumption that it's something new, because all the religions hold out for that. Karma is only the most explicit. So as long as they don't say this is an advance, because they believe in historical progress. Ken Wilber and I have debated this over the years. I too believe in progress for the individual. We can progress and end life more mature, wiser than we began it, but I do not believe in historical progress, which holds that humanity will "lock step" enter into a higher stage of consciousness.

TMA: It happens on an individual basis, one person at a time. The perennial wisdom remains the same through any age, but the approach to it differs with time and place.

HS: I agree.

TMA: Would you talk about that a little bit, how it changes?

HS: I'll start with reaffirming. The "perennial" is alright because that means no matter when. But I have come to prefer "primordial" because it means no matter where or when, therefore adding another dimension. But it is eternal and changeless. Now the approach to it--I would not put the emphasis on the approach to it in different times and places. I would draw the line between mental or spiritual personality types; that is, how our minds work. I have a chapter on that for spiritual personality types, but there is a fundamental cut into a dichotomy which by my language, is the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric. The exoteric, as the etymology of these words says, has to do with the external and the esoteric has to do with the internal, and what is internal tends to be more invisible, less visible. Now the difference between those two mental types is that the exoteric mind can deal with ideas only if they have boundaries. That means only with finite ideas that can be put into words, because all finite things have boundaries. If there was nothing that differentiated them from other things, then they wouldn't exist. But the ultimate, the infinite, has no boundaries, and therefore for the finite mind is nothing.

TMA: Unapproachable.

HS: My favorite example there is C.S. Lewis, who tells us that when he was a boy, his parents drilled in him, "Don't think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited." Lewis says he tried and tried to think of a formless God, and the closest he came was a sea of gray tapioca. Perfect, because he's an exoteric type and no boundaries, no form, nothing--as far as the exoteric mind is concerned. On the contrary, for the esoteric mind [thoughts of God] inspire awe, wonder, praise, simply because they have no limitations.

Let me say one other thing because you were saying the approaches differ and, you were suggesting, they differ over time.

TMA: As ages change.

HS: Over the ages.

TMA: Yes, and as the theme changes.

HS: That takes me back to Ken Wilber, because he believes in progress. I agree that there are changes over the ages, but I disagree that they bring any net progress. I'll just give you a couple of examples. Nuclear fission was discovered and potentially ended the energy problem, but then it gave us nuclear weapons and nuclear waste, so it balances the record. Insecticides came along and we thought that solved the food shortage problem, and in 35 years--it takes 35 years for us to see the consequences of a major technological invention--in the case of pesticides, we had silent spring and the disappearance of species and also the emergence of mutations that resist the insecticides. So I don't believe in historical progress. In my early career, I was, for a couple of years, the Bill Moyers of PBS. I was on the other side of the camera, and so I mounted an interview series for PBS in which I could pick the minds that I would most like to talk to. When I talked to Reinhold Niebuhr, the most influential theologian of around mid-twentieth century, he was against historical progress. I was young and I was gung-ho for it. So I pressed him very hard on that and he said, "well yeah, in certain areas." When I asked him for an example, he said, "Well, plumbing for example. Plumbing has improved." And then he added, "dentistry has improved," but he would never give an inch that history in any day is better than in the previous days.

TMA: Different isn't necessarily better.

HS: Yes, you got that right.

TMA: One of the things I find fascinating in our time is the unprecedented access to the world's religions, both on exoteric and esoteric levels. Never in recorded history have we had such access to all the world's religions.

HS: I think on the esoteric level that is a clear gain. On the exoteric, it is a mixed blessing ... because on the positive side, to look affirmatively on other people's faith is a very good thing. The danger is, how far can you go towards honoring them without losing the honor you originally gave to your own faith? In other words, there's a saying in morality and theology, as well as in art, that art consists in drawing the lines somewhere. If we don't draw any line between what inspired us and what other faiths inspire in people, why, then the danger is that there will be some undefined sort of good feeling. Now, in everything I've said thus far, this--seems to me the one important answer--is less clear. I still stick by it, but have the need to elaborate my idea, if you want me to.

TMA: Please.

HS: I'll do it concretely. You know the name of Bishop Spong; we met a couple of years ago. We did a lecture series down in Monterey, California. My lecture was a month after his. The religion editor of the leading paper there phoned me and said, "Can you stay over the following morning so that I can interview you?" and I agreed. We talked and at the end he said, "This is very interesting." And I said, "Well I'm glad you didn't find it boring," and he said, "No, more than that, the lecturer who preceded you was Bishop Spong-- I asked him virtually the same questions that I've asked you, and he gave me diametrically opposite answers." And I said, "'Well, that is interesting. Say more." And he said, "In essence, his answers were based on the premise that if the church doesn't get with it, then it's going to die out of history. And you, if I have heard you rightly, say that if the church gets too much with it, there won't be any need for it. There will be no difference between it and our conventional wisdom." A few months later I had the opportunity of meeting Bishop Spong face to face. I told him about this, then I asked, "are there any boundaries?" With breathtaking frankness, he said, "I do not know."

Now to my ears, when a Bishop does not know where the boundaries of his or her faith are, that church is in a bad way. With no form--or as I'm talking about this with the general public - the esoteric have no problem with that, because esoteric insists there must be boundaries for a complete religion because a complete religion involves not only our spirit, but our bodies and our minds that crave and feed on form. An authentic religion always has had, and always must have, hope--the formless, the infinite--and the form, which is why so many people who are in the dialogue are puzzled by me, because I insist on, for there to be an authentic religion, that it have an exoteric side--dimension, level--as well as an esoteric, and preclude the cafeteria style of just going for amorphous self-indulgent spirituality.

TMA: Would you speak to the commonality between the esoterics of the religions? It seems to me that if you approach religions across the board esoterically, they're pretty much all saying the same things.

HS: True. There's a phrase in religious studies, "Mystics all speak the same language." Mystics are the esoteric. Every religion has its exoteric, outer side that it shows to the world, can be put into forms, songs, liturgy, theology, words, and the inner essence of what those forms point toward. They all point towards the same mathematical point in the esoteric realm, and it's poetically opposite, for the mathematical point has no dimension because there's no boundary in the esoteric. They all point to the same mathematical point, but they're like the Zen finger pointing at the moon. They point from different positions and therefore the projectory is different. Even though the distance between the tips of the fingers and the moon that they're pointing at is incredibly far, nevertheless, they point in the same direction.

TMA: Do you consider yourself to be an adherent to any one religion or system or another?

HS: Yes, the Perennialist School is a definite school of philosophy, and I belong to that school. They publish a journal called Sophia Wisdom. I am a disciple in that school. They hold what I said earlier, that there is no such thing as esoteric life per se. We all have spirit, we have thoughts and so on that are immaterial, but we also have a body. The parallel for that is that they all hold--and this is where eyebrows get raised when I speak, because I say that one cannot enter fully--meaning with one's whole life, one's will, one's perceptions and so on--into the esoteric except through the exoteric, or a religion that also has an exoteric dimension. That's where New Agers part company with me and, by the same token, prefer "spirituality" over the word "religion," because religion is organized spirituality, and therefore carries the burden of institutionalization.

But we in our Perennialist School say we have to pick up that burden because without those guidelines and channels and the contours of the finger pointing at the moon, the finger can't point anywhere. That sets up again the cafeteria school of do-it-yourself religion.

If I can concretize that, my basic tradition has been Methodist, the one that I was born into of missionary parents in China. I had a good experience with it, and it shaped me in my formative years. I was 17 when I first came to this country. Methodism in no way prioritized that over any of the other religions or denominations within Christendom, but it happens to be mine. Yesterday was Sunday and I was in my pew as I always am if I'm in town, but that in no way, I said no way, for esoteric persons like myself, prioritizes Christianity over the others. And yet, every person needs to have a center, not only for his or her personality, but for faith. I have a friend who puts this very graphically. He says to me, "Huston, you are the only Confucian Methodist that I know." He says, "You know the only thing that keeps you in that wishy-washy middle of the road Methodist Church is filial piety and ancestor worship that you've picked up from your youth in China." I laughed when he told me this, and I said, "Well, you've got a very real point that tradition, religion, does keep me connected with my parents, and I never want them to climb out of me.'

Let me say it one more way. As over against the cafeteria pose where people say how can you speak out after that, when you've taken over this, that, and the other, from all of the other seven traditions that you study? And I said, "That's easy." Christianity has, throughout my life, been my meal, but I have come to be a strong advocate of vitamin supplements, and I take--well, it's not just picking--xperientially, moving sequentially through these other seven religions, things I didn't pick, they picked me. Once I came upon them, I found myself saying yes, yes, yes!

This point has a counterpart in Christianity, but it's not shaded as graphically, as concretely. The dominant example of that is the five daily prayers of Islam, which, when I came upon them, I just loved. I mean, giving a framework to the day, and so on. So I internalized them, and so I have continued to say them. One other example: Reuben, my primary teacher in the indigenous religions, the Native American closest to me, taught me that whenever Native Americans step out of their teepees, which face the rising sun, they raise both their arms and cry, "Ho!" So, when I first confronted the rising sun this morning, I did the same thing.

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Huston Smith, PhD., is the holder of 11 degrees, author of 12 books, producer of 3 PBS series, and the focus of a 5-part, Bill Moyers PBS series on The Wisdom of Faith. He will be in Chicago on April 18th for A Life of Exploring Religious Frontiers and in Wheaton on April 20th for Rediscovering Forgotten Truths.

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