All the “principal architects of the modern mind” (as he calls them in Why Religion Matters) had thought in a way Huston was ceasing to think. The intellectual headmasters of l'école moderne had all been, he now realized, rabidly antireligious. One had likened religion to a drug (Marx); another compared it to useless extra baggage (Darwin); a third, to a slave's mentality (Nietzsche); while the fourth dismissed it in one word, an illusion (Freud). Huston would hear similar disparagements about his chosen field his whole professional life. His colleagues would wonder, sometimes aloud, how anyone so likable and intelligent could believe such mumbo-jumbo and not only believe it but actually teach it in a classroom. At MIT a social scientist came up to Huston and with a witty double entendre asked, “Do you know the difference between you and me? I count and you don't.”
His secular period now behind him, Huston was counting in a different way, or rather counting on something else. Indeed, he may well have become the first person of such prominence in contemporary academia to take religion seriously. The religion department, in the few universities that then had one, had a bias, strange to say, against the very thing they taught. For the modern study of religion took place within the modern view of reality, which denies to religion (unlike politics, say, or economics) a legitimacy of its own. What was taught as religion was in effect sociology or history or anthropology, using religion as its case study. When Huston read John Updike's Roger's Version, he found a passage he could have written himself. A Jesus freak confronts the professor of religion:
What you call religion around here is what other people call sociology. That's how you teach it, right? Everything from the Gospels to The Golden Bough, Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, it all happened, it's historical fact, it's anthropology, it's ancient texts, it's humanly interesting, right? But that's so safe. How can you go wrong? Not even the worst atheist in the world denies that people have been religious.…[S]tudying all that stuff doesn't say anything, doesn't commit you to anything, except some perfectly harmless, humane cultural history. What I'm coming to talk to you about is God as a fact, a fact about to burst upon us, right up out of Nature.
The courses Huston offered in world religions did not play it safe. He tried to teach students about the vast unexplored human possibilities that he was in the process of learning himself through encountering the world's religions.
For instance? The most important thing Huston discovered was that there are radically different ways of being. Different people have contrary emotional responses to the same social stimulus; they give the same phenomenon opposite interpretations and then mistake that interpretation for the objective world. Venturing beyond Judeo-Christianity, Huston was amazed: all people believe alike even less than they all physically look alike. Dissimilar predispositions had proliferated into divers paths to salvation. In Hinduism, for instance, there are four basic human temperaments, hence there are four kinds of yogis. There are karma yogis (e.g., Gandhi) who attain liberation through action, and there are bhakti yogis (e.g., Saint Francis or Mother Teresa) who have great feeling and love their way to salvation. Raja yogis (e.g., the Buddha) meditate their way there, while jnana yogis reach the ultimate goal through intellect or vision. Thus Huston came to realize that the world is incorrigibly plural. And in a shock of recognition Huston identified himself as a jnana yogi, somebody who could use his intelligence, his teaching and writing, to help resacramentalize the world.
How can life be resacramentalized? Huston realized: Not easily, not merely by thinking it so. Lasting salvation rarely occurs in a book-lined study, and the words Huston wrote in such places reflected what he had experienced outside of them. He traveled to Japan and India; he sought out sages and swamis; he lived in ashrams and monasteries; he participated in retreats and sesshins and kumbla melas. He also spent time on Native American Indian reservations and befriended psychics and experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, for ways to enhance and ennoble the human pilgrimage.
Back in the 1960s when you said you'd returned from a trip, you might be asked, Which kind? Huston was interested in both kinds, voyages outward and voyages inward. Indeed, some cultural histories remember Huston less for what he wrote than for what he ingested. Although his use of mescaline was infrequent, Huston never denied the importance of his experience. In the blink of an eye, or rather in swallowing a pill, the curtains seemed to part, opening up another, the mystic's world(view).
The curtains part. On New Year's Eve, 1961, when Huston took two tabs of mescaline at Timothy Leary's house, it might have been odd if he hadn't. Far from bearing a stigma, hallucinogenic drugs then carried a positive connotation, a gateway to elusive wisdom. Huston recalled William James's experience after taking nitrous oxide (laughing gas):
Our normal waking consciousness…is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different…. [A]pply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all there completeness….No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
Huston had read these sentences before; on the night of January 1, at Leary's house, he lived them. Mescaline allowed the mystical vision he knew from books to rise up through his senses. After taking the mescaline, his awareness crossed through the gateway of the three dimensions into normally hidden aspects of existence that evidently had been waiting there, as James had said, behind the thinnest of partitions. He laughed to think how the great religious visionaries of history, had they experiences like this—and they probably had—were just a bunch of hack reporters. In a suburban house in Newton, Massachusetts, Huston had become a visionary himself—“one who not merely believes in the existence of a more momentous world than this one but who has actually visited it.” Certain hallucinogenic (or “entheogenic”) drugs, he saw, could occasion genuine religious experiences, even if—unlike Judaism, say, or Native American spirituality—they do not solidify into an enduring religious life.
That Huston achieved his mystical experience through drugs, which were a “tool” of his particular time, does not discredit it or him. He wanted to be more than a professor; he would be the person who says, I am here, I am not aloof, I and the world are not separate. Thus after World War II, when America went from isolationism to becoming an international power, how fitting it was that Huston then reinterpreted religion using a global perspective. After the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima he joined other concerned intellectuals to oppose nuclear proliferation. Later he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to help end segregation at Washington University, and later still he protested America's war in Vietnam. During the 1960s, in the years of student activism, Huston went from lecturing formally to a give-and-take interaction in his classes, modeled on Martin Buber's I and Thou. As feminist consciousness grew, he corrected his ingrained male-superiority bias and treated his female students with equal if not greater respect. Do such things have anything to do with religion? No, and yes. Unless you would be a holy hermit, Huston thought, you must quit the cloister of abstract theories and go out and engage the spirit of your times.
Which raises a question: Was there a unique “spiritual” character to Huston's era? And what was it like to be a religious person, a jnana yogi, during the twentieth century? Let's take a look.
Everything has a history—the rise and fall of nations, the novel, even the forms of intimate relationships—so it would be hardly surprising were there a subterranean history of spirituality, too. Huston was an attentive, attuned observer of the unexpected spiritual developments unfolding in his time. For example, he studied how the lamas fleeing the holocaust in Tibet reshaped their medieval religion into contemporary, verifiable experience.