something gets accomplished in this same world in the new bodies into which they reincarnate. The Abrahamic religions, on the other hand—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—defer that further work on other planes: purgatory, hell, or other bardos, to borrow Tibetan vocabulary. The similarity that underlies these different imageries is quite apparent.
In the period immediately after death there may be a lot of confusion and bewilderment. Swedenborg thought that the first job old-timers in heaven had respecting newcomers was to convince them that they were dead. (I find the thought that heaven is that much like Stockholm rather charming, but also fanciful.) But there are also indications from psychical research—which I don't totally dismiss, though you have to step carefully. There are souls on the other side that are as confused as we are. Channelers and mediums beware! A lot of static gets mixed into the messages. Some souls may even decompose into fragmented residues. The intermediate realm between heaven and earth may be a real mess.
BENEKE Do you think channeling—spirits running through people—provides evidence of the spirit world, a realm beyond the physical?
SMITH There is no conclusive proof that convinces the Bay Area skeptics. Still, Plato took his to his metaxy, his “intermediate realm,” which housed spirits like Eros, and Socrates's daimon, who never told him what to do but warned him what not to do. Plato took the spirit realm seriously, and I am inclined to do so also. I treat shamanism, for example, with respect. Roger Walsh's book The Spirit of Shamanism finesses the questions of whether the shamans’ “allies” are a part of their own psyches or exist objectively apart from them. But whatever the geography of the case, in spiritual matters, space never functions as more than a metaphor for difference. Walsh too, as a professor of psychiatry, takes shamanism seriously. Wherever we choose to position them, shamanic “allies” are objectively other than the shamans’ conscious minds, and they function accordingly. By the way, shamans appear in the oldest cave drawings we have, which date back about twenty thousand years, and suggest that shamanism may be humankind's oldest religion.
BENEKE The conventional way to dismiss all this is to say that consciousness is a product of the brain; you alter the brain in certain ways, and you alter consciousness. When the brain stops functioning, consciousness stops.
SMITH That could be the case, but I consider it a prejudice of minds that I have come to believe that what we can get our hands on is most real. My reaction to it is like T. S. Eliot's on reading Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship. He said it left him with no idea where the truth lay except that it had to be in the opposite direction from the book in hand.
I find it most interesting that the science that saddled us with reductionistic materialism in its early centuries is now going beyond that position. Quantum mechanics is telling us that the universe of space, time, and matter derives from something that exceeds those matrices. Whether or not that Primordial X is conscious, as religion holds, science cannot say. But at least materialism is now old hat.
BENEKE Noam Chomsky talks about how no one expects a cat to do algebra; similarly, there is every reason to suppose that there are fundamental laws of the universe that humans will never be able to know because of our cognitive limitations. Perhaps our ignorance is inexorable.
SMITH I was Chomsky's colleague at MIT for fifteen years, and I honor him greatly, but here mystery seems a more precise word than ignorance. In principle ignorance can be dispelled, whereas mystery cannot be, because in its case every advance that we make opens onto horizons we didn't even know existed. We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery. That is not going to change.
BENEKE Let me ask an impolite question. Religion appears to some people—Freud, for example—as a form of wish fulfillment. Because people want the world to be a certain way, and because it is emotionally satisfying to believe the world is a certain way, people hold certain beliefs about God or life after death. There is evidence that where there are harsh child-rearing practices with a lot of corporal punishment, people conceive of God as very harsh and punitive. What do you make of this?
SMITH I take heart in your child-rearing example. The fact that God has been seen predominately as a loving parent suggests that harsh, punitive, corporal punishment has been the exception rather than the rule. But your question itself I don't take as impolite at all. It introduces an important issue, the appropriateness of psychologizing. Philosophers consider psychologizing a logical fallacy for being ad hominem; it diverts attention from the content of an issue to the persons who are discussing it. “Two plus two equals four” isn't untrue because the person who said it was drunk at the time. That's a crude example of psychologizing, but Freud's critique of religion and those of Marx and Nietzsche as well have the same form.
This is not to say that psychological considerations are irrelevant. We should be wary of what drunks say, and if Freud had proved that religious beliefs derive only, or even primarily, from wishful thinking and father images, I would accept his reasoning and could live with it. But he didn't come close to doing that, so I see his theories as half-truths. There are textbook cases (I won't venture how many) in which they come close to being the full truth about beliefs. But to generalize from these and turn a half-truth into the full truth is a blatant case of disciplinary imperialism. Psychology—or, in the case of Marx's “opiate of the people,” sociology—colonizes religion and tailors it to fit its theories. You can see that I'm worked up on the point.
Furthermore, the psychologizing sword cuts both ways. If my beliefs simply reflect my character, yours reflect yours. If I believe because I am infantile, you disbelieve because you are counterdependent. You see why philosophers aren't fond of ad hominen arguments. They degenerate into trading insults. I come back to the idea of the world as a Rorschach blot. If you see it as consisting only of matter, then immaterial things that other people believe in will appear to you as projections. They, in turn, will see you as prey to tunnel vision and blind to half of what exists.
BENEKE Tell us about your experience with your Zen master in Kyoto.
SMITH I was drawn to Buddhism through D. T. Suzuki, whose writings held out the prospect of at least a taste of satori, the enlightenment experience, if one practiced Zen. I was in my mid-thirties, and at that stage I wanted that experience more than anything else in the world, so I entered Zen training, which led eventually to a monastery in Kyoto and koan training under a Zen master.
Rinzai Zen (the branch that I was in) uses koans [traditional Zen mental exercises] in its training. Koans are of different kinds, but the beginning ones are rather like shaggy-dog stories in that they involve questions—riddles, really—that make no rational sense. The one I was given was longer than most, so I won't repeat it in full, but it came down to this: How could one of the greatest Zen masters have said that dogs do not have Buddha-natures when the Buddha has said that even grass possesses it? For two months, I banged my head against that contradiction for eight hours a day. I was sitting in the cramped lotus position and reporting to my roshi, or Zen master, one-on-one at five o'clock each morning, what I had come up with. Precious little! It was the most frustrating assignment I had ever been given. I seemed to be getting absolutely nowhere, though I did discover as the weeks slipped by that the final word in the koan, mu (which translates into “no”), seemed to function more and more like the om mantra that I had worked with in Hinduism.
The climax came during the final eight days in the Myoshinji Monastery in the middle of a kind of final-exam period where everything else gets tabled so the monks can meditate almost around the clock. As a novice, I was permitted to sleep three and a half hours each night, but I found that grossly insufficient, and the sleep deprivation was the hardest ordeal I had ever faced. After the first night I was sleepy, after the second I was bushed, and it kept getting worse from there.
I still don't understand how Zen training works, but it seems clear that the initial koans force the rational mind
