Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals - Hardcover

Smith, Huston

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585420344 ISBN 13: 9781585420346

Publisher: Tarcher, 2000

Synopsis

An examination of the link between psychedelic drugs and religious experiences throughout history summarizes the research of the twentieth century and shares the philosophies of such figures as Sigmund Freud and Saul Bellow. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

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 the Inside Flap:

"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 this edition

• Publisher: Tarcher
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1585420344
• ISBN 13: 9781585420346
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 190