John Hick - The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm

Essential reading for anyone concerned with spirituality in the modern world.

Keith Ward, Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, London

This book illustrates the meaning of life from various rich angles. It is simply expressed, but rich.

Ninian Smart

This stimulating book opens up many fundamental issues that must concern everyone. It deserves to be widely read.

Expository Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Hick (1922-2012) held professorial posts at Cornell University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Birmingham. He was described by Desmond Tutu as one of the worlds most distinguished philosophers of religion and was the author or editor of nearly thirty books, including the best-selling Philosophy of Religion. Notable works of his published by Oneworld include Christianity and other Religions, God and the Universe of Faiths, and John Hick: An Autobiography.

A ONEWORLD BOOK

First published in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth by

Oneworld Publications in 1999

This eBook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2013

Copyright John Hick 1999, 2004, 2013

The moral right of John Hick to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781851689910

eISBN 9781780741826

Oneworld Publications

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Dedicated to

the grandchildren,

Jonathan and Emily,

Rhiannon and Alexander,

who will find their own paths in the twenty-first century

This is a new and revised edition of The Fifth Dimension of five years ago. During these five years the world has become more dangerous. The catastrophic 9/11 destruction by hijacked planes of the twin towers in New York in 2001; the slower but even more destructive war in Iraq, leaving a spreading legacy of deeply felt resentment; the seemingly endless round of mutual revenge attacks between Israel and the Palestinians, with tanks and helicopter gunships on the one side and militant suicide bombers on the other; the proliferation of nuclear weapons extending from the USA, UK, Russia and Israel potentially to North Korea, India, Pakistan and possibly elsewhere; the alarming development of relatively easy to use chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction; the continuing thinning of the ozone layer and developing global warming, caused largely by the massive over-consumption of the worlds non-renewable resources by the rich nations; the continuing gap between the wealthy northern and the poor southern hemispheres, leaving millions in deep poverty, many suffering from AIDS and other preventable diseases ... all this, and more, is making our world an increasingly dangerous place to inhabit.

These dangers are all humanly created. They are evils that we humans are inflicting on ourselves. The immediate causes are geopolitical, social and economic. But the deeper cause lies in human minds and hearts, and it is here that any fundamental solution has to begin. If we could all see, and then treat, one another as fellow human beings sharing the same fragile planet we would see war as insanity, revenge as futile and counter-productive, disputes as resolvable with goodwill on both sides, poverty as capable of being ended by intelligent global co-operative planning, and moderation in the consumption of finite resources of fuel and energy as a basic responsibility.

So it is fundamentally the inner life of humanity that has produced the outer political and economic state of the world, and a safer future requires the development of this inner life with its capacity for profound transformation.

This book is about the ways in which, through our inner life, we view the world and one another. I argue for the radical insufficiency of a purely naturalistic, or humanist, understanding of life, and for the reality of a fifth, spiritual, dimension. We are concerned here with the character of the mysterious universe of which we are a part; the meaning of our human existence, with its unpredictable mixture of good and evil, happiness and misery; the significance of religious experience, and of the extraordinary individuals we call saints or mahatmas; the prospect of death and the possibility of life beyond it.

These are big themes, too big for any one thinker, but if some find that these explorations contribute to their own thinking within the wider effort this book will have served its purpose.

John Hick

Note

I have avoided technical terms as far as possible and when Hindu or Buddhist or other unfamiliar words are necessary I have adapted them into English, so that sasra, for example, becomes samsara or even samsara. And I have not engaged here in debate with other scholars, because the concern here is not with the internal discussions of the academic world. However, the basic ideas are ones that I have developed over the last thirty years in a series of other books in which I do debate extensively with academic friends and foes. The aim now is to share the outcome of all that work with the general reader.

I am grateful for permission to use in this book source material of my own that has appeared elsewhere.

Some of Part II first appeared in my book Faith and Knowledge (1st edn. 1957), and reappeared, together with new material, in a paper at a conference on The Meaning of Life in the World Religions at Chapman University, California, in the spring of 1997. It is published in the volume arising from the conference, The Meaning of Life in the World Religions, edited by Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin (Oneworld Publications, 2000). Some of the material on Gandhi was used in a lecture at Boston Universitys Institute for Philosophy and Religion in the spring of 1998 and published in Religion, Politics, and Peace, edited by Leroy L. Rouner (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

ALTERNATIVE PICTURES

We are finite, fallible, fragile fragments of the universe. But because we have an inbuilt need to find meaning we inhabit the universe in terms of a conception of its character a big picture either consciously adopted or unconsciously presupposed. In so doing we are always, whether we realize it or not, living by faith, that is, moving in an immensely important area in which there is no certain knowledge and in which we cannot avoid the risk of being seriously mistaken.

To most of us within our highly technological western culture it has come to seem self-evident that a scientific account of anything and everything constitutes the full story, and that the supposed transcendent realities of which the religions speak must therefore be imaginary. Since at least the beginning of the twentieth century this naturalistic assumption has been an integral part of our culture, and any contrary hopes, dreams, intuitions, sensings of transcendence, intimations of immortality or mystical experiences have been overshadowed by its pervasive influence. But it is a fundamental error to think that the assumptions that our culture has instilled into us, and which we take for granted, are necessarily true. It was Einstein who said that common sense is what we are taught by the age of six, or perhaps, in the case of more complex ideas, by about fourteen. The beginning of wisdom is to become aware of our own presuppositions as options that can be examined and questioned. Otherwise we are wearing mental blinkers without even being conscious of them.