as if shards of perfection pierced my sobs through the heroic way our daughter and her immediate family rose to her death. These experiences gave me the conviction that her death was not the last word.
This is quite apart from my own experience. The point is that the only person who has a right to say that things are exactly as they should be is someone who at the time he or she is speaking is feeling the heel of the oppressor's boot smashing down on their face. If you can say it then, it is real. Otherwise, it is Pollyanna escapism.
BENEKE The most famous example I know of is Aldous Huxley, dying of cancer, saying, “Yes this is painful, but look at the perfection of the universe.” I can at times experience the universe as a manifestation of eternity, some great being behind the universe. I can to a degree transcend my own immediate pedestrian needs and involvement, but when this happens I experience extraordinary wonder and terror as well. Castaneda talks about balancing the wonder of being human with the terror of being human. Religion is about this sense of deep belonging in the universe, but I am not so sure that it is benign or friendly.
SMITH I distinguish between my thoughts and my emotions here. The Hindus speak of the jivanmukta, a person who, perfectly enlightened, is uninterruptedly aware of the perfection of things while still in his or her body. They cite Ramana Maharshi [a Hindu spiritual leader] as an instance. For my part, much as I revere Ramana, I'm not sure that even his bliss was unvarying. For several decades now I don't recall that my head has doubted the perfection of things, but experiencing it is a different matter. I doubt that within these mortal coils it is possible to quiet the emotional waves of ups and downs that are our human lot. But my head sees farther than my emotions, and when I'm depressed I can hear it saying, “Poor Huston. He's got the spiritual flu, but he'll get over it.”
There is more to be said about the tumor in the lungs, however. One of the reasons I did not doubt God or the eternal during the seven and a half months of our daughter's dying—I touched on this earlier, but want to spell out—was the way she and her immediate family rose to the showdown. Her life had had its normal joys and defeats, but the spiritual work that she accomplished in those thirty or so weeks of dying was more than enough for a lifetime. Her sarcoma cancer began in the abdomen and spread rapidly, exerting pressure on her vital organs. But even when her condition had her at the breaking point, her farewells to us, her parents, in our last two visits were “I have no complaints” and “I am at peace.” Her last words to her husband and children (Kendra and I arrived minutes too late) were, “I see the sea. I smell the sea. It is because it is so near.” She always loved the sea. I think it symbolized life for her.
BENEKE A lot of us lapse readily into self-pity when we are sick or in anguish and think that the universe stinks.
SMITH I have told you what I believe, but I don't think there is proof as to who is right. Life comes to each of us like a huge Rorschach blot, and people fall into four classes in the way they interpret it. First, there is the atheist who says there is no God. Next comes the polytheist who says there are many gods, gods here meaning disembodied spirits of whatever sorts. Then there is the monotheist who says there is one God. And finally, the mystic for whom there is only God. None, many, one, and only. Using God as the measuring rod, these are the basic ways we can interpret the universe. There is no way to prove which way is right.
BENEKE I don't hear you using the word faith.
SMITH That is because the word is so free-floating. Everyone who has not given up has faith in something. If not in God, then in science, life, himself, the future, something. My favorite definition of faith is “the choice of the most meaningful hypothesis.”
BENEKE That sounds a little like William James's pragmatism, which would have us believe things because of their positive effects on us.
SMITH That was James the psychologist, carrying over into James the philosopher. I'm not a pragmatist; I do not believe in believing in things because of their beneficial effects on us. I reject the argument that says, “Here is this mysterious Rorschach blot, life. Let's interpret it optimistically because that energizes us and makes us feel good.” To hell with that line of thought! The question isn't what revs us up and makes us feel good, but what is true.
BENEKE And your intuitive discernment, your jnanic faculty as you call it, tells you that the universe is perfect.
SMITH Yes, but I don't rely solely or even primarily on my own intuition here. The chief reason I accept it is that it conforms to “the winnowed wisdom of the human race,” as I like to think of the enduring religions in their convergent metaphysical claims. The word wisdom needs to be qualified, though. Not everything in the “wisdom traditions” is wise. Modern science has retired their cosmologies; and their social formulas—master/slave, gender relations, and the like—must constantly be reviewed in the light of historical changes and our continuing search for justice. It is their convergent vision of ultimate reality, the Big Picture, that impresses me more than any of the alternatives that modernity has produced.
BENEKE Could you tell us precisely what you experience when you “intuitively discern” the perfection of things?
SMITH Something like Plato's experience when he said, “First a shudder runs through you, and then the old awe steals over you.” I would not mind stopping with that, but other sensations can be added. Excitement. Exhilaration. Confidence. Selflessness and compassion. Peace.
BENEKE Underlying religion is the problem of death. Socrates defined philosophy as practice in the art of dying. You embody the traditional notion of the philosopher as a seeker of wisdom, someone who is concerned with the great questions of life. What do you think happens when we die?
SMITH I need to hesitate for a moment, for this is another place where it's easy to sound glib. The only honest answer is, Who knows? This is the ultimate mystery. Still, the mind keeps searching for answers, or at least for insights.
To pass into death is an adventure, for sure. Near the moment of his passing, Henry James said, “This is the distinguished moment.” What the passage does is to raise again the question of final perfection. I believe in universal salvation, which is to say that everyone eventually comes to something like Dante's beatific vision, which phases out of time into the Eternal Now. That term isn't easy to understand. I have heard even theologians deride eternity as boring. That flagrantly misrepresents the concept. Boredom presupposes time that endures without changes, whereas eternity is outside of time.
BENEKE Boredom is when time is a weight burdening you, and you want to get rid of it.
SMITH Exactly, which is why it could not possibly characterize eternity. There are, however, two conjectures as to what the soul experiences in eternity. We must keep in mind that we are out of our depth here, and that these are what Plato would call no more than “likely tales,” that is, human imagination's best stab at the mystery. One conjecture is dualistic. Here the soul retains its separateness and beholds, timelessly, the Glory, in keeping with Ramakrishna's dictum, “I want to taste sugar, not be sugar.” In the nondualist version, what the soul beholds is so overwhelming that it commands the soul's complete attention, all 100 percent of it. With zero attention left for itself, that self drops from sight, leaving only what its attention is fixed on. As the Hindus say, “The dewdrop has slipped into the shining sea.”
BENEKE This sounds like the German mystic Meister Eckhart saying that “the eye through which God sees us is the eye through which we see God.”
SMITH You have it word perfect, though I am still not sure I understand what those words say. Something like what I was saying, I suppose. All the traditions make the point, though, that unless you are the rare case of a Hindu or Buddhist nonreturner, your spiritual work is not complete when you “drop the body,” as Indians refer to death. Something
