The Arc of Life - Life, Death & Beyond - Huston Smith and Ken Dychtwald. Full interview from the DVD

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.


Ken Dychtwald has for decades studied and interviewed hundreds of seniors, but found Smith to be unique. To quote Dychtwald, "One of the things that surprised me most ... was his sense of humor, his playfulness. ...Being in the presence of a deep-thinking philosopher and religious expert in his nineties who was boyish, who was teasing, who was fully participating in the sparring action of the interview, who was having fun, who was clever and wry and creative with his mind as any 12 or 15 or 25 year old I've met, was an incredible experience."


Reviews:

The Arc of Life DVD is a magnificent contribution to understanding of Huston Smith and his work. --Harry R. Moody, Ph.D., Director of Academic Affairs, AARP

I loved this interview with Huston better than any I've heard or seen in ten or fifteen years. I found Ken Dychtwald's questions so clever, in that they solicited from Huston aspects of his philosophy that I had never heard before! I found myself thinking, 'why didn't I ever ask him that?' Of course, the answer is that Ken is a more astute interviewer, and possessed of an incredible knowledge on the subject at hand. --Dana Sawyer, author Aldous Huxley, a Biography, and Huston Smith biographer

Huston Smith ends the arc of his life with kindness and wisdom that is both ordinary and extraordinary. His interview with Ken Dychtwald inspires this writer to approach the final chapters with less fear and more hope. --Don Lattin, author of THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB

About Huston Smith (May 31, 1919 – December 30, 2016)

Huston Smith was Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Syracuse University. For fifteen years he was Professor of Philosophy at M.I.T. and for a decade before that he taught at Washington University in St. Louis. Most recently he has served as Visiting Professor of Religious Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Holder of twelve honorary degrees, Smith s fourteen books include The World s Religions which has sold over 2 ½ million copies, and Why Religion Matters which won the Wilbur Award for the best book on religion published in 2001. In 1996 Bill Moyers devoted a 5-part PBS Special, The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith, to his life and work.

His film documentaries on Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sufism have all won International. awards, and The Journal of Ethnomusicology lauded his discovery of Tibetan multiphonic chanting, Music of Tibet, as an important landmark in the study of music."
About the Director

Jon Monday directed and co-produced this documentary with his wife, Anna Monday. Jon has been involved with music and video production since the 1960s and decades in the music business. Most of Monday's work centers on Vedanta archival and newly created materials on CDs and DVDs.

With his wife Anna, they run mondayMEDIA, a full production and distribution company. He produced, directed, and distributes recordings and films of such diverse subjects as Charles Bukowski, Huston Smith, Chalmers Johnson, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley. Monday is also president of Benchmark Recordings, which owns and distributes the early catalog of the Fabulous Thunderbirds.