Cleansing the Doors of Perception

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

by Huston Smith

Tarcher/Putnam Publishers, New York, New York     © 2000    163 pp.

The essays in this book were written over the past 40 years by a renowned professor of religion and philosophy, and collected in this single volume as part of a series on entheogens. Entheogens (translatable as God-enabled) are defined as nonaddictive, mind-altering plants that seem to harbor spiritual potentials.

Many such plants have been used sacramentally as traditional spiritual medicine throughout human history (e.g., peyote by American Indians, soma as found in the Hindu Vedas, ayahuasca in Amazonian Peru), however Smith's introductory essays describe his experience as a psychological research subject in LSD studies at Harvard in the early 1960's. These essays reflect his academic and personal interest in the nature of religious experiences of the sacred unconscious through brain chemistry changes, whether they are valid, and how they compare to similar experiences occurring without such chemicals.

Differing topics in the book include the staying power of psychedelic theophanies compared to non-drug-induced ones, challenges to cognitive science's characterizing of the relationship between consciousness and brain activity, the hidden identity of soma and the protected Eleusian teachings as esoteric mysteries, and reports of LSD research with psychiatric patients of Stanislov Grof in Czechoslovakia resulting in personality/behavior changes as well as transpersonal processes expressed as loss of subject-object dichotomy.

Smith's short introductions to each chapter provide helpful explanations of background or setting, while also connecting the dots between his writings and research over time. This is a recommended read if one is interested in psychology, comparative religions, and a select history of the 60's psychedelic era.

In the end, Smith believes the entheogens' basic message is true -- that there is another Reality that puts this mundane reality in the shade. 

-- reviewed by Mona Bronson 


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