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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Aug 4, 2000 | Huston Smith, 81, speaks slowly with the deliberate enunciation and wry playfulness of a serious scholar who is used to having what he says deeply considered. Seated in his Berkeley, Calif., living room, the authority on world religions takes out a letter he's just received from a reader of his most recently published book. The letter recounts a spiritual epiphany.
"It is so moving," Smith intones warmly and begins to read it aloud with evident respect:
"It was like I traveled into myself and broke through to the other side, and I was in the presence of God. I was in communion with all that ever could be, and experienced love beyond measure. I experienced a person loving me. Being love. Being all. Total peace. The end of all fear. Eternal joy. I was in union with an infinite person who had nothing but perfect love for me and in whom I was in union and it was ALL, capital A, double L ..."
The letter describes a "theophany," nothing less than a vision of the divine. It is also a 51-year-old man's remembrance of an LSD trip at age 18. The teenager, who got more than he bargained for when he dropped acid, grew up to be a Catholic priest.
For reasons that require no explanation, the priest never told his church superiors about this formative religious drug trip, as he confides in the letter. He's written to Smith in response to the religious philosopher's provocative new book: "Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals."
In this collection of scholarly essays on drugs and spirituality written over the past 40 years, Smith explores and entertains a venerable yet now taboo topic: how mind-altering drugs have led to divine revelation. Though Smith himself participated in Timothy Leary's famous drug experiments at Harvard, it wasn't until a maverick think tank called the Council on Spiritual Practices approached him that he decided to do the book.
Founded by a former vice president of Oracle, the council is no collection of fly-by-night Castaneda-heads who have tried to turn an appreciation for hallucinogens into a higher calling. Robert Jesse, 41, who once worked full-time with techie marketers and engineers, now spends his days with religious scholars, spiritual leaders and scientists whose work addresses "primary religious experiences." Rather than being content to just hear about the divine secondhand, these thinkers focus on ways that individuals come to perceive it, feel it and see it directly.
The Council suggests that these transcendent experiences can be triggered by a diverse variety of influences, ranging from a monk's holy visitation after days of prayer and fasting to a Native American roadman's vision after a potent hit of peyote. The Council funds academic research, publishes books, hosts speakers and has even held a conference about the nature of such religious experience. And although they are sincerely interested in any activity -- be it meditation or dancing or gobbling magic mushrooms -- their stance on the relationship between drugs, or as they put it "certain plants and chemicals," and enlightenment puts them square in the middle of the raging culture war over the legalization of drugs.
While the loudest criticisms of U.S. drug laws have come on political, social and medical grounds (with the proponents of medical marijuana most vocally grabbing the limelight), now Huston Smith has dared to make a religious freedom argument. "I was extremely fortunate in having some entheogenic experiences, while the substances were not only legal, but respectable," he said of his early experimentation with LSD. "It seemed like only fair play that since I value those experiences immensely to do anything I could to enable a new generation to also have such experiences without the threat of going to jail."
Were this statement to come from almost anyone else, it would not stand a chance of being heard. But Smith is that rare living person who adjectives like "great" and "renowned" and "acclaimed" accrue to without a tinge of overstatement. His 12 books of religious scholarship and philosophy include "The World's Religions," which has sold some 2.5 million copies around the world over more than 30 years. He has taught at Washington University, MIT, Syracuse University and most recently the University of California at Berkeley. Over his long career -- he got his Ph.D. in 1945 -- Smith has become that notable academic who also reaches a popular audience. He's even the subject of a five-part Bill Moyers PBS documentary called "The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith."
This side of a religious leader, Smith probably couldn't have a bigger voice in the popular cultural conversation when it comes to spiritual questions. Who else could get to use the platform of National Public Radio to discuss the religious importance of illegal substances? At a recent bookstore reading, Smith himself touched on his odd circumstance.
"Many people do ask why someone of my honorific age would risk something of a reputation to move into a topic that is this controversial," he quipped, drawing appreciative smiles from the audience. Here's a respected scholar with no less than 11 honorary degrees, publicly jumping into the fray of the war on drugs, and better still, all in the name of religion. It's enough to utterly stump the most "compassionate conservative."
But before anyone breaks out in choruses of "Right ons!" be clear that Smith's interest in mind-altering substances is explicitly limited to their "philosophical and spiritual," not "recreational" use. Indeed, both Smith and the Council take great pains to distance themselves from the hedonists who indulge in drugs without the divine in mind. They employ the neologism "entheogenic" -- meaning roughly "God-enabling" and coined in 1979 to replace "psychedelic." Among the spiritually minded, "entheogenic" can refer to the likes of mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, peyote, MDMA (aka ecstacy) when they're approached as a religious sacrament and not just as a way to get high.
If it sounds like a tough distinction to draw, consider that the Pentagon itself has come to grasp it. When the military formally allowed Native American soldiers to use peyote in religious services, a Pentagon spokeswoman told the Associated Press in 1997: "If they're using peyote in their religious practice, it's a sacrament, not a drug, just as sacramental wine is not considered a drug." While peyote remains a "Schedule 1" controlled substance today, a 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1974 created an exemption for Native American use of peyote in their traditional religious ceremonies. It's the only such exemption, where an otherwise illegal substance is legal for use by a designated group in the U.S. on grounds of religious freedom. The Brazilian government has gone even further with regard to ayahuasca, a substance which, like peyote, has a long history of religious use. First provisionally in 1986, and then permanently in 1992, Brazil legalized the religious use of the substance.
Smith's essays in "Cleansing the Doors of Perception" range from scholarly to personal and some even revel in Smith's own drug experiences. One piece, "Empirical Metaphysics," recalls his time with Timothy Leary in the early 1960s. "We felt like we were on the cutting edge," he writes of his Harvard cohort. "On the new frontier to new knowledge about what the human being is and can be." There was no need to go "underground," he explains. "Getting down to business, we pulled out our date books to schedule a session with mescaline."
