Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions was published by Harper & Row in 1976, and it presents Smith’s most direct philosophical argument: that the great religious and philosophical traditions of humanity share a common metaphysical vision (often called the “perennial philosophy”) that modernity has abandoned — not because it was refuted but because the modern worldview cannot accommodate it.
The “forgotten truth” is the idea that reality is layered — that the physical world accessible to the senses is only the outermost layer of a multi-dimensional reality that includes psychological, spiritual, and transcendent dimensions. Every traditional civilization knew this; the modern West, uniquely, has collapsed reality into a single dimension (the physical) and declared everything else illusory.
Smith draws on Hinduism (the levels of atman and Brahman), Buddhism (the doctrine of dependent origination and the levels of consciousness), Platonism (the divided line), Christian mysticism (the great chain of being), and Sufism (the levels of the soul) to show that these traditions — apparently so different in their surface teachings — share a remarkably consistent vision of reality’s structure.
The book is not primarily a work of scholarship but a work of advocacy: Smith is arguing that the modern materialist worldview is not merely incomplete but actively destructive, and that recovering the “forgotten truth” is necessary for human flourishing.
Collecting Forgotten Truth
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1976): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$15