ANGELS WE HAVE HEARD WHILE HIGH

Religion Scholar Huston Smith Looks At Drug Use And Spiritual Experiences

Cleansing The Doors Of Perception: The Religious Significance of
Entheogenic Plants and ChemicalsBy Huston SmithTarcher/Putnam; 173 pages;
$22.95

Drug abuse has been called the United States' worst public health problem,
and our government has waged a "war on drugs" for decades with decidedly
mixed results. Drugs, especially tobacco and alcohol, sicken and kill
millions of Americans, and the list of illegal drugs is long, with drug
users filling our prisons.

What might it mean, then, when one of the world's most renowned religious
scholars writes in his new book, "Cleansing the Doors of Perception," that
some select illegal drugs hold the potential for humans to realize their
highest spiritual potential, and that use of these drugs might even be part
of the very origin of man's greatest aspirations and faiths?

Longtime Berkeley resident Huston Smith is no dope fiend. He's not even
another Timothy Leary. Smith has taught at some of the nation's leading
universities, holds 11 honorary degrees and written 11 books, including
"The World's Religions," the most widely used text on comparative religion,
selling over 2 million copies in the past 30 years. He has produced a
number of television series and was himself the subject of a Bill Moyers
PBS series, titled "The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith."

While teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, he
writes, Smith encountered a small circle of already or soon-to-be infamous
scholars who were looking into the psychological and spiritual potential of
drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and LSD. Famed
English author Aldous Huxley was visiting MIT and had already "come out" as
a self-experimenter in his classic "The Doors of Perception." Across town,
Leary and Richard Alpert (who renamed himself Ram Dass) were embarking on
the "research" that would get them fired from Harvard and put them in the
public eye as both gurus and scourges.

Smith, however, took a much quieter route. "I am more philosopher than
activist," he notes. And thus he tried various drugs only a few times and
for a short period, expressly with the purpose of exploring "drug-induced
religious experiences on the grounds that they come up with the same basic
claims about reality that religions always do."

His book is a collection of essays on that question, including updated
versions of papers published in academic journals decades ago but still
absorbing and timely today. The only real shortcoming of these landmark
writings is that a broader range of mind-altering chemicals, either
manufactured ones such as MDMA, known as Ecstasy, or indigenous concoctions
such as ayahuasca from the Amazonian basin, have become increasingly common
in recent years, with attendant risks and potentials.

Smith holds that true seekers do not use entheogens, which he defines as
"virtually nonaddictive drugs that seem to harbor spiritual potentials,"
just for kicks. "Emotionally the drug experience can be like having
forty-foot waves crash over you for several hours while you cling
desperately to a life raft which may be swept from under you at any
moment," he reports. In other words, for a seeker, entheogens are likely to
be more challenging than thrilling, but with the potential to make
"epochal" changes in one's view of the meaning of life.

As for any connection of drugs with authentic religion, Smith laments that
"it is next to impossible to speak of it in the West today without being
misunderstood" -- in other words, without being labeled "pro-drug." But he
feels so strongly that such a link exists that he likens our cultural
denial of it to earlier refusals to accept that the Earth rotates around
the sun. "When the fact that drugs can trigger religious experiences
becomes incontrovertible," he notes hopefully, "discussion will move to the
more difficult question of how this fact is to be interpreted."

Ever scholarly, Smith's admittedly tentative attempts at this
interpretation are replete with fascinating historical references and
quotes from thinkers ranging from Plato to Jung to William James. He looks
back at ancient India, where entire sects used psychoactive mushrooms until
the "quality" of religiously based drug use declined: "Three thousand years
in advance of our times, India may have found herself on the brink of a
psychedelic mess like the one America created in the 1960s."

The resulting repression of drug use by the ruling class may have resulted
in more of the kind of sloppy illicit drug use (and abuse), where "it is
impossible to determine whether sattva (illumination) or tamas (sloth)
predominates." In other words, some things don't change, or, as Smith puts
it, "One man's meaning is another man's mush."

There are also fascinating quotes from American Indians who have long used
peyote as "medicine" to commune with their spirits and, ironically, to
"cure" themselves of alcoholism. The use of drugs for spiritual purposes is
really nothing new, and Smith even raises the possibility that some
religious traditions have in fact developed out of primal drug experiences
long forgotten in history.

Seemingly aware of the risks of overstating his case, Smith notes that
drug-induced "theophanies," or religious revelations, are often not
lasting, and that "opening the gates of heaven at the start, there comes a
time -- I can attest to this myself -- when they begin to open either onto
less and less or onto the demonic." The dreaded bad trip, then, is also a
hazard for the true seeker.

Among the often-startling footnotes here is the revelation that Bill
Wilson, the revered founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, told Smith that he had
tried LSD and "counted his entheogen experience as equal in the conviction
it engendered to the conversion experience that led him to his founding of
Alcoholics Anonymous." Equally startling to many will be the mention of
experiments with cancer and other severely ill patients who had their pain,
both physical and emotional, radically helped with the use of entheogenic
drugs.

Smith's language and thinking do venture into arcane regions. But after all
its deep inquiry into matters metaphysical and pharmacological, "Cleansing
the Doors of Perception" closes with a crucial real-world policy question:
"Can a way be found to legitimize, as the Greeks did, the constructive,
life-giving use of entheogenic heaven-and-hell drugs without aggravating
our serious drug problem?"

Smith does not propose to answer that riddle. What he does do in this
brilliant, challenging, warmly written and courageous book is provide the
strongest case yet for why that very question might be so important. Smith
does not propose to answer that riddle. What he does do, in this brilliant,
challenging, warmly written and yes, courageous book, is provide the
strongest case yet for why that very question might be so important.

Steve Heilig is a San Francisco public health policy analyst and serves on
the editorial board of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.