Cleansing of the Doors of Perception

World religion scholar Huston Smith was turned on by Timothy Leary after the two were introduced to one another by Aldous Huxley in the early 1960s. The experience was interpreted as deeply religious by Smith, and is captured in detailed religious terms in Smith’s later work Cleansing of the Doors of Perception. This was Smith’s one and only entheogenic experience, at the end of which he asked Leary, to paraphase, if Leary knew the power and danger of that with which he was conducting research. In Mother Jones Magazine, 1997, Smith commented:
“First, I have to say that during the three years I was involved with that Harvard study, LSD was not only legal but respectable. Before Tim went on his unfortunate careening course, it was a legitimate research project. Though I did find evidence that, when recounted, the experiences of the Harvard group and those of mystics were impossible to tell apart—descriptively indistinguishable—that’s not the last word. There is still a question about the truth of the disclosure.”