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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
The Doors of Perception.
Huxley, Aldous. (1954, 1970).
New York: Harper & Row.
| ISBN: | first edition none |
| paperback 0-06-080171-9 |
| Description: | First edition, 79 pages. [1954] |
| Paperback, Perennial Library edition, 79 pages. [1970] |
Contents: 1 essay.
Note: The best essay
on entheogen experience.
Excerpt(s): According
to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.
But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs
to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large
has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and
nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle
of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive
on the surface of this particular plant. To formulate and express
the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly
elaborated those symbol
which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary
and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been
born-the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the
accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in
so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness
is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality,
so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words
for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is
called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness,
expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various
"other worlds," with which human beings erratically
make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness
belonging to Mind at Large. (pages 24-25)
The urge to transcend self-consciousness
is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul. When, for
whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by
means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are
apt to resort to religion's chemical surrogates-alcohol and "goof
pills" in the modern West, alcohol and opium in the East,
hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central
America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol
and barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America.
(page 67)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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