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.