Author, teacher, and lecturer Huston Smith is best known for his scholarship of the World's Religions.Huston's best selling book, The World's Religions, has sold over 2 million copies and is a standard textbook for colleges and universities; he was the "adult in the room" in the Harvard LSD experiments in the early 1960s; he helped the Dalai Lama come to the US for the first time, and helped native Americans establish in law, the right to use peyote in their religious ceremonies. He was considered the dean of interfaith gatherings and studies.
On December 27, 2009, Ken Dychtwald, psychologist, gerontologist, and visionary thinker on the subject of the "age wave" is upon us (that Baby Boomers, the population burst that followed WWII, have entered old age). Ken interviewed Smith with the objective of getting not his academic view, but rather his personal views of growing old and facing death.
Dychtwald brought out the warmth, depth, common sense, and wonderful humor of Huston Smith in the course of elucidating Smith's perspective on life, from the perspective of a 90-plus year old.
While Huston Smith has been a pioneer and role model for the Boomer generation in the field of Religious Pluralism, he now has something to teach us about the aging process. The two men developed a wonderful rapport, Smith being elated to encounter in Dychtwald as an interviewer with a sharp mind and novel approach. At one point, he turned to Dychtwald, arms spread wide, saying, "If you see an opening, hit me!" ...much to Dychtwald s delight.