Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #822375 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 173 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Cleansing the Doors of Perception is a fresh consideration of the age-old relationship between psychedelics 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 speculative historical writing about the possibility of Cardinal John Henry Newman's experience with such chemicals, 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

Customer Reviews

Psychedelic masterpiece.
"The essays in this book span almost forty years. I have edited them liberally, excising repetitions and passages I no longer consider important. Each essay is introduced by a statement that notes the occasion for which it was written and locates it on the trajectory of the book as a whole. My intent 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." The word 'entheogenic' means god-containing or god-enabling. The plants include peyote and amanita muscaria and the chemicals include LSD and psilocybin. This is a sober and well-referenced book, and would be interesting to anyone thinking or writing about the subject. It contains many descriptions of drug-induced mystical experiences, including Huston Smith's own. I recommend it. John Rowan 20 April, 2001