Cleansing the Doors of Perception is a fresh consideration of the age-old relationship between certain psychoactive plants and chemicals and mystical experience by one of the most trustworthy religious writers of our time. Author Huston Smith (most famous for his classic The World's Religions) is the Walter Cronkite of religion scholars. He has long believed that "drugs appear to be able to induce religious experiences" and that "it is less evident that they can produce religious lives." At the same time, he posits that "if ... religion cannot be equated with religious experiences, neither can it long survive their absence." Therefore, Smith's basic question about entheogens (a word he defines as "nonaddictive mind-altering substances that are approached seriously and reverently") is "whether chemical substances can be helpful adjuncts to faith." Cleansing the Doors does not offer one sustained argument in response to that question. Instead, the book collects Smith's many articles about this subject, and connects them with brief introductory essays. The writings gathered here range from personal testimony about Smith's own experience with entheogens to ethnographic work on the use of entheogens in India. Throughout, Smith's style conveys the wisdom and wonder that has guided his explorations of this strange, fascinating aspect of religious experience. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly
Religion scholar and "missionary kid" Smith discovered psychedelic drugs in good company, alongside Timothy Leary and the crowd at Harvard that experimented with LSD, mescaline and psilocybin in the 1960s. In Cleansing the Doors of Perception (the title a play on Aldous Huxley's cult classic The Doors of Perception), Smith argues that while psychedelics can illuminate the religious life, these drugs can not induce religious lives. Therefore, Smith concludes, religion must be more than "a string of experiences." If drugs cannot replace religion, however, they can aid the religious life, when psychedelics are used in the context of a larger religious commitmentAas with the Native American use of peyote. But this provocative inquiry into the relationship between drugs and religion is overshadowed by Smith's unreflective strolls down memory laneAsuch as his description of the Good Friday experiment of 1962, when a group of Harvardites popped psychedelics and attended Good Friday services. Smith says it was one of the most spiritually meaningful days of his life. Partly because of such reflections, his book, which includes many previously published essays and interviews, does not hang together. The reader skips from Smith's musings about John Humphrey Noyes to a case study of Hindu drug use to a bizarre comparison of Leary and the church historian Tertullian. In the acknowledgements, Smith thanks the Council on Spiritual Practices for encouraging him to gather all his essays on drugs into one volumeAreaders may wish the Council had held its counsel. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Smith (The World's Religions) is a well-known historian of world religions. What is not well known is his lifelong fascination with the use of entheogenic plants and chemicals such as psilocybin mushrooms and LSD in attaining religious visions and whether such visions are "true." This book is a collection of personal essays spanning 40 years of his investigations. Taking an anecdotal approach, he makes no attempt to be authoritative or objective, yet he uses the viewpoint of a historian as he surveys the history of 20th-century, mostly American experiences in using psychoactive drugs to reach the divine. He writes about his relationships with Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary, both firm believers in mind-altering substances. But while Smith does not discount the use of such drugs in obtaining supernatural visions, he does not play the role of advocate, either. Little is proven, but much is offered to readers who want a general overview. Recommended for public libraries.DGlenn Masuchika, Chaminade Univ. Libs., Honolulu Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
It takes something of a visionary and a revolutionary to fly in the face of convention. When "family values" becomes the rallying cry of everyone from presidential candidates to TV talk show hosts, and the ongoing war on drugs fosters a climate of fear rather than reassurance, it is a bit of a shock to hear it suggested that nonaddictive drugs might enhance spiritual behavior and, indeed, that substance-altered states may echo religious experiences. Renowned religious historian Smith makes those suggestions in a brave discussion of the connection between religious experience and entheogenic (i.e., psychedelic) substances. Smith was at the forefront of experiments with psychedelic drugs in the sixties, though, and these essays span some 40 years. Liberally updated and edited, they examine Aldous Huxley's early experiences with LSD, Timothy Leary's adventures as counterculture guru, and Carlos Castaneda's use of the peyote sacrament of some American Indian traditions, and even touch on the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud and William James. Calmly, in measured tones, Smith lucidly and learnedly mulls over a most controversial topic. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
This book takes a serious look at the use of psychedelic drugs as a means to achieve mystical union with the divine.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"On this treacherous subject, where it is easy to go wrong, Smith has written a book that is as responsible as it is informed. His views are completely in accord with my own."
—Albert Hofmann, Ph.D.,
author of LSD: My Problem Child

Huston Smith, one of the world's most respected religious scholars and author of The World's Religions, now offers Cleansing the Doors of Perception, a course-correcting assessment of the connections between entheogens, religious experience, and the divinely inspired life.

The entheogens are plants and chemicals that have been used, some of them for thousands of years, and are being used today around the world, as means for going beyond the ordinary and encountering the sacred.

The greatest single impediment to understanding the entheogens is "psychedelia": the entire range of cultural baggage dating from the 1960s, from Day-Glo painted minibuses to lava lamps, tied together by the implicit belief that the most important use of entheogenic mushrooms, peyote, and their chemical cousins is to have a perpetual Happening.

Cleansing the Doors of Perception aims to undo that confusion. It does not restate the extreme claims of the 60s about liberation through intoxication; rather, it asserts that those claims were profoundly mistaken and helped cause some people to lose their spiritual way. It communicates the key role that entheogens can play when used in contexts of faith and discipline, and it sets out what the entheogens show us about the nature of mind and spirit.

Smith explains that he has kept his eye on this issue throughout the last 40 years of his career because he shares Aldous Huxley's opinion that nothing is more curious, or to his thinking more important, than the role that mind-altering plants and chemicals have played in human history. "My intent," writes Smith, "has been to produce a work that touches on the major facets of its enigmatic subject as seen through the eyes of someone (myself) who, given my age, may have thought and written more about it than anyone else alive."

About the author:
Huston Smith, holder of eleven honorary degrees, is an internationally recognized philosopher and scholar of religion. Selling over two and a half million copies in several editions, his book The World's Religions has been the most widely-used textbook on its subject for a third of a century. In 1996, Bill Moyers devoted a five-part PBS special to Smith's life and work, entitled "The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith." Smith has taught at Washington University, M.I.T., Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to Cleansing the Doors of Perception, he has authored eleven books and over eighty articles in professional and popular journals. Smith has produced three series for public television, and his films on Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sufism have all won international awards. He lives in Berkeley, California.

FROM THE CRITICS

John Horgan

This wise, witty, wondrous book, by the world's foremost religious scholar, will surely provoke a long-overdue reconsideration of the potential of mind-expanding compounds. Like the work of Aldous Huxley, Cleansing the Doors of Perception is destined to become a spiritual classic.

Peter Coyote

With drug problems so prevalent in today's world, it takes someone with the probity, impeccable credentials, and irrefutable spirituality of Huston Smith to revisit the religious potential of entheogenic (old-timers, read: hallucinogenic plants and chemicals. Reframing the pursuit of inner knowledge in the deeply spiritual languange that motivated most of those I knew to explore such substances, Smith offers scientific, medical, and religious data to support what has been a ￯﾿ﾽsecret' as old as humanity: that there are modes of perception far more transporting, ecstatic, and illuminating than everyday consciousness, and the doorway to such altered states may be literally underfoot. I am extremely grateful for this revisit, and applaud the courage it took to face down those who continue to dominate public dialogue on drugs with two-dimensional responses to a multidimensional reality.

Publishers Weekly

Religion scholar and "missionary kid" Smith discovered psychedelic drugs in good company, alongside Timothy Leary and the crowd at Harvard that experimented with LSD, mescaline and psilocybin in the 1960s. In Cleansing the Doors of Perception (the title a play on Aldous Huxley's cult classic The Doors of Perception), Smith argues that while psychedelics can illuminate the religious life, these drugs can not induce religious lives. Therefore, Smith concludes, religion must be more than "a string of experiences." If drugs cannot replace religion, however, they can aid the religious life, when psychedelics are used in the context of a larger religious commitment--as with the Native American use of peyote. But this provocative inquiry into the relationship between drugs and religion is overshadowed by Smith's unreflective strolls down memory lane--such as his description of the Good Friday experiment of 1962, when a group of Harvardites popped psychedelics and attended Good Friday services. Smith says it was one of the most spiritually meaningful days of his life. Partly because of such reflections, his book, which includes many previously published essays and interviews, does not hang together. The reader skips from Smith's musings about John Humphrey Noyes to a case study of Hindu drug use to a bizarre comparison of Leary and the church historian Tertullian. In the acknowledgements, Smith thanks the Council on Spiritual Practices for encouraging him to gather all his essays on drugs into one volume--readers may wish the Council had held its counsel. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal