Richard Smoley
He attended the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, and took a bachelor's degree magna cum laude in classics at Harvard University in 1978.
Smoley went on to Oxford University, where in 1980, he received a second bachelor's degree from the Honour School of Literae Humaniores (in philosophy and classical literature).
While Smoley was at Oxford, he came in contact with a small group that was studying the Kabbalah, co-founded by the British Kabbalist and author Warren Kenton (Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi).
[1] Smoley subsequently started Kabbalah groups along similar lines in San Francisco, New York, and Knoxville, Tennessee, which no longer meet.
In 1986, Smoley started writing for a new magazine called Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, founded in San Francisco by Jay Kinney.
At Oxford, Smoley helped revive the dormant magazine of Corpus Christi College, The Pelican, and published some short works in it.
In May 1999, Smoley's book Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions, coauthored with Jay Kinney, was published by Penguin Arkana.
In this book Smoley traces the history of Gnostic and other esoteric currents of Western civilization — including Manichaeism, Catharism, the Rosicrucian legacy, Freemasonry, Kabbalah, and Theosophy.
It also explores how these currents have shaped modern trends and thinkers ranging from William Blake to Jung, and, in more recent times, Philip K. Dick and Harold Bloom.
In a review of this book for Parabola, the magazine's executive editor, Tracy Cochran, wrote, "With clarity and verve, [Smoley] lays out famous arguments and articulations of the conundrum of the nature of consciousness so that they sparkle like jewels on the dark velvet of starlight.
"[8] Smoley's book Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, published by Tarcher/Penguin in 2013, is a collection of his essays on subjects including Atlantis, prophecy, Freemasonry, Nostradamus, hidden masters, and A Course in Miracles.
Jung to explore the human predicament in terms of a deep loss of primal consciousness reminiscent of the Indian concept of maya.
Smoley’s 2022 book Introduction to the Occult (the first edition was published under the title The Truth about Magic in 2020) is an edited transcript of audio-video recordings of Smoley providing basic guidance on concepts that are widely discussed but often misunderstood, including magic, occultism, thought power, psychic powers, healing, ghosts, life after death, and psychedelic spirituality.
Organizations that have sponsored his lectures and workshops include the Bodhi Tree bookstore (West Hollywood), the California Institute of Integral Studies (San Francisco), East-West Books (New York), the Kabbalah Society (London), the Lumen Foundation (San Francisco), the New York Open Center, and the Swedenborg Foundation (West Chester, Pennsylvania).
Smoley highlights his literary background in a foreword and afterword to a 2021 edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, published by G&D Media.
Smoley's books show a certain progression in that his earlier works, particularly Hidden Wisdom, are more descriptive of the ideas and teachings of others, notably those in the Western esoteric tradition, while his subsequent works, particularly Inner Christianity, Conscious Love, and The Dice Game of Shiva, A Theology of Love, and Seven Games of Life, are devoted to expounding his own views, which he associates to some extent with esoteric, or, as he styles it, "inner" Christianity (a term he credits to the late Robin Amis).
Smoley occupies a somewhat ambiguous position in regard to the academic study of esotericism, pioneered by François Secret and Antoine Faivre at the Sorbonne and developed by such figures as Wouter Hanegraaff, Joscelyn Godwin, Arthur Versluis, and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.
So I'm not sure that academic inquiry will really do justice to the spiritual traditions of the West, particularly since scholastics, from the time of Aquinas onward, have been notoriously bad at distinguishing intellectual knowledge from the deeper, experiential understanding called "gnosis."
"[1]: 13 In his 2009 work The Dice Game of Shiva, Smoley, drawing inspiration from the Hindu philosophical school known as the Samkhya, equates this self and other with the terms purusha and prakriti respectively.
For the Hindus it is atman; the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism speaks of it as rigpa, "pure consciousness"; other Buddhists call it "Buddha nature or simply "mind."
He quotes the French esotericist Papus (Gérard Encausse) to this effect: "Adam does not represent an individual man, but rather the sum total of all men and women in their ulterior differentiation.
Because this fall would be an event that takes place outside the dimensions of space and time, Smoley's view neither conflicts nor concurs with contemporary scientific cosmologies.
Although he does not posit this dichotomy as absolute, contending that it arises out of a groundless being (or nonbeing) in which self and other are not distinguished, he insists that it is fundamental to the way we experience the world.
Smoley does not identify this principle with the historical Jesus in any kind of exclusive or privileged way: "This primal level of consciousness ... is the deepest part of us, as it is of everything that exists.
"[16] In fact Smoley appears to accept the Christology of A Course in Miracles, which portrays Jesus as the figure who, through his crucifixion and particularly his resurrection, crucially reversed the fall of the cosmic "Adam," but only as a kind of first among equals in the human race.
"[17]: 65–66 While Smoley does not completely reject the popular idea of "soul mates" (which can be traced back to Plato's Symposium), he does display considerable skepticism about it.
Agape is the love of the cosmic Christ, in which each cell of Adam recognizes that it is joined to the larger whole, that what in it says "I" at the deepest level is identical to that which says "I" in everything else, human and nonhuman.
"[21]: 268 Elsewhere in the book Smoley discusses the larger dilemma faced by those who try to predict the future: The scientific or quasi-scientific futurologist can base his forecasts only on the continuation of current trends.
Consequently, he is entirely happy to foretell all kinds of upheavals, natural and supernatural—the submerging of continents, the manifestation of extraterrestrials, the shifting of the earth's pole, the return of Jesus Christ.
[21]: 284 In an afterword prepared for the second edition of The Essential Nostradamus, Smoley also shows skepticism about the then-current prophecies regarding 2012: "It seems ridiculous to me to single out specific dates."
