Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals | 
| Author: Huston Smith
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 812510
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 190
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 1585420344
Dewey Decimal Number: 291.42
EAN: 9781585420346
ASIN: 1585420344
Publication Date: June 19, 2000
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Condition: This book was officially withdrawn from the library system. It has barcodes and stamps.
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Amazon.com Review
Cleansing the Doors of Perception is a fresh consideration of the age-old relationship between certain psychoactive plants and chemicals and mystical experience by one of the most trustworthy religious writers of our time. Author Huston Smith (most famous for his classic The World's Religions) is the Walter Cronkite of religion scholars. He has long believed that "drugs appear to be able to induce religious experiences" and that "it is less evident that they can produce religious lives." At the same time, he posits that "if ... religion cannot be equated with religious experiences, neither can it long survive their absence." Therefore, Smith's basic question about entheogens (a word he defines as "nonaddictive mind-altering substances that are approached seriously and reverently") is "whether chemical substances can be helpful adjuncts to faith." Cleansing the Doors does not offer one sustained argument in response to that question. Instead, the book collects Smith's many articles about this subject, and connects them with brief introductory essays. The writings gathered here range from personal testimony about Smith's own experience with entheogens to ethnographic work on the use of entheogens in India. Throughout, Smith's style conveys the wisdom and wonder that has guided his explorations of this strange, fascinating aspect of religious experience. --Michael Joseph Gross
Product Description
Here is a fascinating inquiry into the religious significance of consciousness-magnifying substances by Huston Smith, author of THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS and a leading thinker of our time. In CLEANSING THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, Smith's historical knowledge and personal experience combine with his literacy in the cognitive sciences to produce the only comprehensive book that has been written for the general public on the mysterious relation between the entheogens, consciousness, and faith. Psychoactive plants have long served as spiritual catalysts, from the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece to the Native American Church and from India's sacred soma to the religious practices emerging from the Amazonian rainforests. In this book, Smith takes us into the heart of modernity's struggle to align historical evidence with what we now know about brain chemistry. His friendships with Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary (while Leary was at Harvard), Gordon Wasson (who cracked the 2000-year-old secret of India's soma plant), and Albert Hofmann (the discoverer of LSD) have made him eye-witness to much of the twentieth century's work in this area. Cleansing the Doors of Perception (the title pays tribute to Huxley's THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION and to Blake's original use of the phrase) is a deeply serious and learned inquiry into a topic of enduring importance.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Valuable scholarship for a number of reasons December 2, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book collects essays from nearly 40 years of Smith's research into psychedelics. It addresses a number of issues:
o The experiential dimension of the drugs
o The relationship of the drugs to religion
o The history of psychedelics in the United States
The historical dimension is fascinating for children of the baby boomers, who are too young to have experienced the 1960s. He discusses the experiements conducted at various institutions in the 1960s. He talks about Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman, and Timothy Leary.
Leary gets special attention in the essay on the viability of the drug culture as a new religious movement.
I recommend reading this book after having read the classic The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley. This volume gives a much more mature perspective, since it is a retrospective decades after the fact.
I highly recommend this book to several audiences. The first obvious audience is the would-be psychonaut. The book recounts the authors experiences with psychedelics. (The author prefers the term entheogens.) Students of religion would also benefit from this book. The author is a professor of religious studies, and several of the essays collected in this volume deal directly with the mystical experience brought on by the drugs.
 Fascinating, informative and valuable. April 1, 2006
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
Somehow, over the past 40 years of so, certain drugs have gotten a very bad reputation. Drugs, that is, that do not have official approval. Alcohol, prescription opiates, anti-depressants, caffeine, and nicotine (perhaps the most addictive substance on the planet) are fine, and are even sanctioned and promoted by the power grid that calls the shots. Entheogenic substances (formerly known as hallucinogens) however, after experiencing their apogee during the long lost, much lamented sixties, have been consigned to the same prison cell as heavy duty opiates, destructive stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamines, and other negative drugs like GHB, Rohypnal and Ketamine. This book does an excellent, scholarly job of explaining and illustrating why this is a very bad thing. Entheogens have been with us for a long, long time, and may have been the catalyst for the formation of many of our major religions. Psilocybin, mescaline (peyote), and Soma (perhaps Amanita Muscaria) have been responsible for stimulating some of the most profound insights and experiences ever recorded. LSD, a modern entrant to the entheogen club, appears to be just as effective. There is a test in the book -try to distinguish between a genuine religious mystical experience and an entheogenic mystical experience. I failed the test.
Smith is no spaced out weekend tripper. He effectively documents the modern age of the entheogens by describing the mid-century efforts of Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception), Albert Hofmann (the inventor of LSD), and tune-in, turn-on, drop-out Timothy Leary. You can see how things went wrong in the latter sixties, especially after LSD and other zeitgeist challenging drugs were criminalized. Not that Smith advocates downing these substances like candy. Far from it. These drugs deserve respect, and they had respect in the societies that used them many years ago. The hard reality is that these drugs are political. Look around you. It's not a happy place we live in right now, in spite of what your net income may have been last year. The planet is heating up, with drastic consequences soon to be evident. There is an asymptotic concentration of power in the hands of a very few. The most powerful nation on earth (indeed in history) is becoming increasingly erratic and warlike, and teeters on the edge of a catastrophic economic collapse. The sick world economic arrangement encourages huge population centres like India and China to ape the behaviour of the United States. The media that might help people to figure things out have been bought and co-opted by the powers that wish the status quo to continue. If you have any gnostic leanings at all, it's hard not to believe that the Archons are firmly in power. These drugs, the entheogens, allow you to cut through the smoke, the propaganda, the confusion, the maya, to let you see what really is. They offer hope that you are part of a mysterious, fundamentally wonderful and positive universe and that things will be alright. So, to the powers that be, they are dangerous, and thus illegal. Just read some of the testimonials and the experiences in this book. They have the ring of truth to them. Not that Smith is advocating entheogens as a quick escalator to the divine. No, he makes it clear that, although certain drugs can shake up your world view and make you question where your life is going, and make you aware of another, better plane of existence, it's how you live the rest of your life that matters. A drug may point out your destination on the map, but you still have to work to get there.
The case of Soma, an early pillar of the Hindu religion, is interesting. Smith speculates that the secret of Soma may have been intentionally 'lost' by Hindu religious leaders about 3000 years ago because use of Soma had gotten out of control (much as hallucinogen use did in the 1960s). A more likely scenario, in my view, is that Soma was suppressed by a religious elite because it represented a threat to their power. With increasing institutionalization comes increasing repression, because powerful people then have a lot to lose. If you ingest an entheogen, you see your own version of reality, unreality, or whatever. You don't have to take what your priest says or what you read in a sanctioned text to be the final word. The power structure thus loses the ability to define reality.
Some quibbles. The title (Cleansing the Doors of Perception) implies (at least to me) that a seeker will find ways or even methods within to raise their consciousness or make progress towards enlightenment, but this book is more of a starting point in that regard, not a primer. It might be better titled Concerning the Doors of Perception. Also, I found Smith at times to be gratingly deistic. I react to the over-use of the term 'God'. That word is too restricting and has too much negative baggage to be useful in such a discussion. Smith also at times comes across as somewhat credulous. Anecdotes are not necessarily persuasive evidence of paranormal phenomena such as telepathy or precognition. If these phenomena are real and many people have the capacity to demonstrate them, let them be tested scientifically like any other legitimate phenomena. Of course, when they are tested the results do not materialize. (Their supporters call this the 'shyness' effect.) But the above are only minor annoyances and do not take away from the value of this wonderful book.
 Read "The Doors of Perception" instead. July 25, 2004
6 out of 16 found this review helpful
The greatest contributions in this book were just the native americans talking about what peyote meant to them, and why it should be legalized. The author, although more than qualified to write on the subject, has no passion or fire behind his writings and the essays seems to be written in a manner which Mr. Smith's extensive vocabulary is showcased over the much more exciting power of the entheogens. If you haven't read Aldous Huxley's masterpieces "The Doors of Perception" and "Heaven & Hell" read them instead. If you have read those already, you will not learn anything new here.
Mind meeting January 18, 2004
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
a highly informed and elegant look inside the world of our minds. This is a work that adds to the classics on the subject and offers a slightly more sophisticated perspective than one would expect.Very interesting stuff.
A provocative yet insightful and non-judgmental survey November 14, 2003
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
A Highly recommended addition to Metaphysical Religious Studies, Cleansing The Doors Of Perception: The Religious Significance Of Entheogenic Plants And Chemicals is the work of philosopher and religion scholar Huston Smith and presents an informative survey and analysis of psychedelic and entheogenic drugs, including their usage to connect human beings with the divine. History, theology, philosophy, psychology, and personal experience fill the pages of this provocative yet insightful and non-judgmental survey of man's use of chemicals in a dedicated quest to expand both mind and spirit.
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