If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything
would appear to man as it is, infinite.


- William Blake

I saw Huston Smith speak last night about his new book, titled after Aldous Huxley's Doors Of Perception (in turn titled from the poetry above). The book came about after a representative of the Council on Spiritual Practices (www.csp.org) approached Smith with the idea of collecting his entheogenic essays from the past forty years into a single volume. The motivation of the Council was to lend Smith's credibility to their goal of "working cautiously toward carving out a space where serious students of the entheogens can pursue their interests carefully and lawfully." Smith was a perfect choice for representing this perspective since his first experience with psychedelics was under the auspices of Harvard University's 1960-63 research program instigated by Timothy Leary. Numbering among Huston Smith's buddies in this field are Leary himself, Aldous Huxley, Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann.

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