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

Religion scholar and ""missionary kid"" Smith discovered psychedelic drugs in good company, alongside Timothy Leary and the crowd at Harvard that experimented with LSD, mescaline and psilocybin in the 1960s. In Cleansing the Doors of Perception (the title a play on Aldous Huxley's cult classic The Doors of Perception), Smith argues that while psychedelics can illuminate the religious life, these drugs can not induce religious lives. Therefore, Smith concludes, religion must be more than ""a string of experiences."" If drugs cannot replace religion, however, they can aid the religious life, when psychedelics are used in the context of a larger religious commitment--as with the Native American use of peyote. But this provocative inquiry into the relationship between drugs and religion is overshadowed by Smith's unreflective strolls down memory lane--such as his description of the Good Friday experiment of 1962, when a group of Harvardites popped psychedelics and attended Good Friday services. Smith says it was one of the most spiritually meaningful days of his life. Partly because of such reflections, his book, which includes many previously published essays and interviews, does not hang together. The reader skips from Smith's musings about John Humphrey Noyes to a case study of Hindu drug use to a bizarre comparison of Leary and the church historian Tertullian. In the acknowledgements, Smith thanks the Council on Spiritual Practices for encouraging him to gather all his essays on drugs into one volume--readers may wish the Council had held its counsel. (June)