Pubdate: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 Source: Inquirer (PA) Copyright: 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. Contact: 400 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19101 Website: http://www.phillynews.com/inq/ Forum: http://interactive.phillynews.com/talk-show/ Author: David O'Reilly, Inquirer Staff Writer 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." - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck