ALTERED STATES

Respected Religion Scholar Explores Spiritual Experience Fostered By Drugs

On New Year's Day 1961, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor
Huston Smith sat in the living room of Harvard Professor Timothy Leary in
Newton, Mass., and ingested two capsules of mescaline. "The world into
which I was ushered was strange, weird, uncanny, significant, and
terrifying beyond belief," he says.

Those words come from Smith's latest book, "Cleansing the Doors of
Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals"
(Jeremy P. Tarcher, $22.95). It is a collection of essays spanning four
decades that explore the nearly taboo subject of drugs, the spiritual
experience and the religious life.

How unexpected that Smith, one of the best-known scholars of comparative
religion, should address such a topic in this anti-drug age and at this
stage in his career. He is 81, has been the subject of a Bill Moyers
television series and owns a secure reputation. His books are popular, too:
"The World's Religions" is among the best-selling books on faith ever
published.

Smith doesn't deny that the "Psychedelic Sixties" resulted in a "real
mess," as he puts it. The evidence hits him smack in the face every time he
walks past the dropouts on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where he lives.

Yet Smith notes -- in agreement with many scholars -- that certain
psychoactive plants have been used in religious rites for thousands of
years. The ancient Greeks had their Eleusinian Mysteries. Scholars have
speculated that the Vedic tradition arose from visionary experiences
induced by a plant known as soma, perhaps a psychoactive mushroom. American
Indians use peyote -- which contains mescaline -- to reach the "sacred
unconscious."

Smith argues that there should be a place for the responsible, sacred use
of such "entheogens," or "God-facilitating" substances. They are not to be
abused or used recreationally. And they are not for everybody; there are risks.

But the entheogenic vision, Smith says, can give a foretaste of eternity.
It shows that everyday "reality" is flat and monochromatic, like shadows on
the walls of Plato's famous cave. It confirms, he says, what believers hold
on faith: That there is another world, better than this one.

I spoke to Smith -- tall and skinny, with snow-white hair and beard -- at
his modest Berkeley house. His two dogs, Jacob and Tashi, wagged in and out
of the living room. In the kitchen, Smith's wife, Kendra, who accompanied
him in that 1961 mescaline session, was whipping up lunch.

Q You write that peyote, like the other entheogens, can be a moral compass.
Will you explain?

A The typical entheogenic experience or vision is of another world. Just
like Plato tells us: The world outside the Cave is a more significant,
momentous other world. And once you have had a glimpse of it, compassionate
behavior is the natural response.

Q How come?

A Say you were in the presence of Mother Teresa. Can you imagine following
her for a day and then going off in the evening and getting drunk or doing
abominable acts? Well, these visions lay the same foundation -- when we see
human life in a broader, and a more true, a more veridical light, we see
ourselves as more than we had thought we were. And that "more" never leads
in the direction of evil or sin.

Q You write that mescaline acted as a psychological prism that expanded the
bands of your own perception. How?

A I still knew who I was, that I'd taken the mescaline, where I was -- in
Timothy Leary's house. And I could bring myself down to that level, if I
wanted to. And occasionally I would touch bases with it, and could hear my
friends' voices in the next room, and could understand what they were saying.

But then, colors and light had depth, spatial depth. And patterns on the
carpet undulated. More importantly, time was very paradoxical. A moment
could be both just a moment and all time, pressed into that moment. You
experience what Blake described: Holding eternity in the palm of your hand.
You are seeing things more like they actually are than when we are in our
normal state of consciousness.

Q So the entheogenic experience "opens" the brain?

A Oh, yes. And we bring something back: We realize that there is another
world. Now I think that realization is the heart of all religion. There is
our mundane, everyday world, and then another world, which is incomparably
superior to this one.

Now in our materialistic, skeptical, reductionistic, scientistic society,
why, we're in danger of losing our confidence that there is another world.
But once you've had the authentic entheogenic experience, you can't be the
same as before. I come back to Plato's Cave: If the prisoner has been
released, taken out into the sunlight and seen the sun, and then gone back
inside, shackled once again -- he can never doubt that what he saw was more
real, more true, than the shadows on the wall.

Q But religions use all sorts of tools to find that other world:
meditation, drumming, chanting, abnormal breathing. Why write about the
entheogenic visions -- which some would call "hallucinations?"

A I did not publish this book lightly. The opening sentence of the preface
says, "Is it possible today, in the climate of fear created by the war on
drugs, to write a book on the entheogens. . . .? And is the reading public
ready for such a book?"

I still do not know whether the public is ready. It's not an easy book. So
the danger is that the reader makes a short-circuit and thinks, "Here is
perhaps the leading popularizer of the world's religions. . . . speaking up
for drugs."

If anyone, just seeing the cover of this book and my name, took it as a
come-on for taking drugs, I will be very sorry that I published it. Because
there are risks in taking any kind of mind-altering substance, including
the entheogens. Many drug experiences are just cacophany and may be delusory.

The corollary is that there can also be gains. And I begin the book with
quotations from William James and Aldous Huxley. These are Huxley's words:
"The mescaline experience is without any question the most extraordinary
and significant experience available to human beings this side of the
Beatific Vision."

The issue for my book is that there can be gains: the direct experience of
another world, which is better, and which is our eternal home. Now, the
possibility of having a foretaste of that can give something precious to
the religious seeker -- can boost their confidence so that they do not
simply take these teachings of the religions as hearsay or on faith.

Q Still, If you walk down Telegraph Avenue, there are burnouts all over.
How can you establish a groundwork for responsible, religious use of
entheogens?

A This is an important point. But mine is not a programmatic book. I am a
historian and a philosopher. The practical problem, I delegate to a group,
right here in the Bay Area, that calls itself the Council on Spiritual
Practices. Can we devise the equivalent, for entheogens, of seat belts in
automobiles? The council is working on that.

Q What were the circumstances leading to your first entheogenic session at
Timothy Leary's house in 1961?

A I had brought Aldous Huxley to MIT in 1960, and he landed there the very
same week that Leary landed at Harvard, a mile and a half up the Charles
River. So Leary got in touch with Aldous, and I was serving as Huxley's
social secretary.

I had put in 20 years on meditation. I don't knock it; I still meditate.
But I'm a flat-footed mystic, in the sense that meditation never created
thumping mystical experiences for me. . . . I was hoping for a mystical
experience. And I didn't get one. I think my ego boundaries are unusually
firm. . . . So, I of course volunteered for the experiment. At this time
the substances were not only legal but respectable. We were involved in a
Harvard research project!

Q You write about returning home after taking the mescaline, and finding
your "precious" children asleep in bed. Did you ever feel that you had
opened yourself to influences that might harm your children?

A No. I felt a depth of delight in seeing them -- which most parents sense
and are aware of, in our better moments, when we're not too busy. But it
took on a new dimension. They seemed, even if it seems prosaic to say it,
infinitely precious to me. And for about three or four days after that,
when the spell was still sort of lingering, I didn't want to do anything
practical. And fortunately it happened on New Year's Day, so we were on
holiday. I just sat around in wonderment and wanting to be with those I
love and shut out the rest of the hectic world, sit in the garden, just
mulling over and drinking it all in.

Q But it didn't really change the course of your life. You didn't turn on
and drop out, as Leary recommended.

A It didn't change my thinking at all. Because my world view of the mystics
was already solidly in place. What it did was enable me to experience what
I had long believed to exist.

Q Has it undermined you over the years, or been a negative?

A No negative. But, let me say that I only had a handful of entheogenic
experiences during those years. About a decade ago, I got involved in the
Native American cause, and I gave two years of my life to that. I had four
overnight vigils in the teepees with members of the Native American Church,
and I took the peyote. But that was "in the line of duty."

Otherwise, it was all back in the '60s and, as the saying goes, "When you
get the message, hang up." I got the message very quickly, after about the
third ingestion. I wasn't learning anything new. And the "bummers," which
are very real and can happen, began to increase. I'd learned what I needed
to learn.

I have a tremendous awe of these substances. And awe is not fun. For awe is
that unique religious experience which combines two opposites, fear and
fascination. Fascination, because realms of existence are opening that you
didn't even know are there. And fear, because these are new realms, and can
you survive? And often there come times when you are afraid you'll be crazy
for the rest of your life.

I hold these substances in fear, and that's one reason I don't want to
repeat it. The other is that I have things to do and don't want to be
interrupted!

Q Some scholars say the ancient Greeks ingested an entheogen during secret
rites known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. What might these have been like?

A The Eleusinian Mysteries held in place for 2,000 years, and the top
philosophers -- Plato, Pythagorus and so on -- were initiates. It was the
elite intelligences. And in 2,000 years, no one ever violated their oath
not to tell what went on or what was disclosed to them in that monthslong
initiation. Boy, that is fidelity to the promise of secrecy! On the
climactic night, we know they drank a potion, and it was an entheogen.

Now I'm going to make a little diversion. These visionary experiences can
come about through the ingestion of maybe five substances -- the
entheogens, taken by the right people in the right settings. But they are
also brought on by two other things: physical exhaustion, including
fasting, and water deprivation.

Think of Buddha under the bodhi tree: He had one of the world's
earth-shaking visionary experiences. And the austerities that he went
through -- according to the accounts, 50 days motionless and not drinking.
So Buddhism: Kicked off, by an experience occasioned by brain chemistry
alteration.

Christ, after his baptism, goes into the desert for 40 days and nights.
Where is his water coming from? Where is his food coming from? I can't
prove it, but it seems to me very likely that his brain chemistry underwent
certain alterations as a result of exhaustion and ordeal.

Q What's the difference between insight and delirium? There's some
relationship.

A Absolutely. And I'm sorry to tell you this, but there's no litmus test to
separate the two. Plato, who had undergone the Eleusinian Mystery, said
that there are several kinds of madness. And in fact, I quote him saying,
"The greatest truths are those that come to us through divine madness." Now
"divine madness" seems like an oxymoron. It seems mad to the world. And yet
it opens the door to truth.

Aldous Huxley told me, "Never say that these experiences are caused by
mescaline" or whatever substance it was. "Say they are occasioned by" the
ingestion of these substances. He saw the distinction, and how they are
enabling, but they are not the sole cause. I think they direct our
awareness by certain configurations that happen -- neuron firing -- which
let revelations come through to us. But they do not generate those
revelations. They cleanse the doors of perception.

I'm wrestling with the thought of one more essay that will squarely face
this question: Can we hold on to the conviction that these disclosures
about the mystical experience are true -- not just trumped up by scrambling
neurons in the brain?

Q Why do you have such faith in their truth?

A Because they have shown me what I already believed was true. They didn't
change my world view. They just fleshed it out with direct experience.

One more thing: The important thing is not altered states, but altered
traits of life. If the experience doesn't in the long run make you more
compassionate, reduce the clamoring ego so that you can give attention to
others -- why, then it's for the birds. Experiences come and go. In fact,
this is one sign that people are on the wrong track if they keep on wanting
more and more experiences. They ought to get down on their meditation pad
and start meditating to bring what they discover into their daily life.