DRUGS WERE HIS DOOR TO THE SACRED

When the dust settles and any denunciations cease, religious scholar Huston
Smith hopes people will know at least the core idea of his newest book.
"Only the slightest of barriers separates us from our sacred unconscious,"
he assrts. "It is infinitely close to us." That sounds mainstream, in an
Eastern sort of way. Why, then, should Cleansing the Doors of Perception
threaten a fuss? Because Smith, graybearded and 81, dares to take us back
through forbidden doors, now locked and illegal, that he entered half a
lifetime ago. "To have become overnight a visionary - one who not merely
believes in the existence of a more momentous world than this one but who
has actually visited it - was no small thing," he writes. Smith seems to be
describing the same wondrous encounter with the divine that mystics have
sung of for millennia.

And perhaps it was. But Smith launched himself into the "Light of the Void"
not through years of meditation, or whirling dervish exercises, or 40 days
fasting in a desert. Rather, on New Year's Eve 1961, Smith, then a visiting
professor of religious studies at MIT and author of the classic best-seller
The World's Religions, sat in the Cambridge, Mass., living room of Harvard
professor Timothy Leary. There he ingested two capsules of mescaline, the
mind-altering drug derived from the peyote cactus. "The world into which I
was ushered was strange, weird, uncanny, significant, and terrifying beyond
belief," he wrote in a 1962 essay reprinted as Chapter One. Within about an
hour, Smith was experiencing consciousness itself as composed of about five
bands, "all real," beginning with "the clear, unbroken Light of the Void,"
which fractured into "multiple forms" and declined as it devolved "through
descending levels of reality." "It should not be assumed . . . that the
experience was pleasurable. The accurate words are significance and terror,"
he writes. The experience, then legal, would be a felony in all 50 states
today.

Federal laws passed in 1965 and 1970 identified mescaline, psilocybin,
peyote, LSD and other "hallucinogens" as having a "high potential for abuse"
and placed them alongside heroin and cocaine as so-called Schedule I drugs,
with severe penalties for their possession. But Smith asserts that his 1961
experiment transformed him profoundly, revealing "range upon range of
reality that previously I had only believed existed." That lingering sense
of awe brims beneath every page of this provocative, even dangerous, book.
CLEANSING THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION: THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF ENTHEOGENIC
PLANTS AND CHEMICALS, due out tomorrow, is an anthology of the 10 lucid
essays Smith has written about psychedelic drugs during the last 40 years.
"It's a risky book because the hysteria about these substances is so
inflamed," Smith conceded in a telephone interview from his home in San
Francisco. Indeed, publisher Tarcher/Putnam notes on the copyright page that
the substances mentioned in the book are "not without risk" and that most
are illegal today, "even for religious use." "But I'm a scholar and a
philosopher," said Smith, who was the subject in 1996 of a five-part PBS-TV
series, The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith, with Bill Moyers. "I don't
believe in sweeping truth under the rug. So I describe the interface between
these substances and religion." In fact, Smith has never been shy about the
substances he calls "entheogens," a term that translates as "God-enabling."
He prefers it to "psychedelics," which means "mind-manifesting" but conjures
images of giggling hippies tripping on "acid" - the nickname for LSD - or
horror stories about teenagers imagining they are snowflakes and jumping out
of windows. Smith pins the blame for entheogens' bad name on Leary, an
"Irish rebel" whose LSD mantra, "Tune in, turn on, drop out," helped launch
an epidemic of irresponsible psychedelic-drug use in the 1960s and '70s. "It
was a great mess," he said. Yet for the millions of souls like himself,
unable to experience the "sacred unconscious" through meditation, prayer and
other disciplines, Smith argues that entheogens such as peyote and mescaline
may be the only portal to other, perhaps ultimate, realities. Such
expansions of consciousness can be "the most important experience a person
can have, short of the beatific vision," he said. Indeed, the title of the
book comes from a line by William Blake, the 18th-century mystic poet, who
wrote, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to
Man as infinite." Smith insists he is not an advocate for entheogens. "I'm
not recommending or discouraging their use. I could have lived a happy life
if these had not come along. If anybody found my book a come-on, I would
feel sorry," he said. Minutes later, however, he remarked he feels that
"it's wrong for society to shut off this experience, to say 'if you have
this experience we'll put you in jail.' " Robert Jesse, executive director
of the San Francisco-based Center for Spiritual Practices, which advocates
the legalization of entheogens for religious purposes, said that the use of
peyote is widespread among Native Americans and that entheogens have
enhanced the spiritual practices of many American-born Buddhists and other
seekers.

But the threat of legal sanctions discourages people from revealing their
practices, he said. Smith, born in China to Methodist missionaries, was a
young man when he found in Vedantic Hinduism what he has described as "a
profundity of worldview that made my Christianity look like third grade." He
was later attracted to Buddhism, which overwhelmed him "like a tidal wave."
And while he prays in Arabic five times a day and practices hatha yoga, he
still belongs to the Methodist Church because he admires the Methodists'
"good works." Among the many provocative arguments in Doors is his
speculation that "religion" itself might have arrived in human culture after
unwitting humans first ingested entheogenic plants. He devotes one chapter
to the theory that Hinduism's mystical Vedic tradition can be traced to an
ancient entheogenic brew derived from a plant called "soma," and another
chapter to the alleged holy, healing power of peyote. Whether the
mind-states induced by entheogens are identical to the spontaneous
experiences of mystics seems impossible to prove, but Smith argues that they
are "indistinguishable." And traditional mystics, he argues, are likely
experiencing changes in their own brain chemistry induced by fasting,
fatigue, meditation, dancing, emotion, illness and other workings of the
body. "Moses was on Sinai 40 days and nights without food when he saw the
mountain. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness before he saw the heavens
open up. Buddha attained enlightenment after six years of austerity," he
said. And yet for all his exaltations, Smith insists that religious
experiences, whether chemically, spontaneously or divinely induced, can
never be ends in themselves. "People can live good, holy lives without
them," he said, and anyone seeking an encounter with "the encompassing More"
needs only a few glimpses.

Perhaps just one. His handful of experiments with mescaline and psilocybin
back in the 1960s were "all that were necessary," he insisted.

Or as his late friend and mentor, Aldous Huxley, once quipped: "When you get
the message, hang up." "If someone were to offer me today a substance that
(with no risk of producing a bummer) was guaranteed to carry me into the
Clear Light of the Void and within 15 minutes return me to normal, I would
decline," he writes. Why? For starters, "awe is not fun." The only valid
objective purpose of a religious experience, Smith said, is to make one's
life consonant with the divine: "The point is not altered states but altered
traits." "The basic message of the entheogens - that there is another
reality that puts this one in the shade - is true," he argued. "But the
experiences come and go. What is enduring is the quality of your life."