DON'T GET TOO EXCITED: this isn't a handbook on how to survive a boring sermon by getting out of your head, or a guidebook for raving rabbis on how to make the Torah trendy.
If ever a book reflected a stodgy title, this is it: a grind through the uses and effects of 'virtually non-addictive drugs that seem to harbour spiritual potentials' and their place in a religious context.
So it's not about how weird and wonderful a visit to Lucy in a diamond-studded sky can be, but about how mind-altering substances, natural or manufactured, seem to underpin the mystical experiences (seeing God in visions, for example) fundamental to almost all religions.
It is a surprising spin, therefore, on where the ancients of various creeds might have been coming from when they wrote their sacred texts. But there is a problem: the book is put together without a trace of levity. The reason is partly that the essays that comprise it (written from the 1960s onwards and brought up to speed for a new generation with extended notes) have been bunched together by the Council on Spiritual Practices (whatever that is), which is 'moving cautiously towards carving out a space where serious students of the entheogens can pursue their interests carefully and lawfully'. Note that the council isn't advocating mushroom mayhem and a wild time for all.
It makes Smith sound like a spoilsport, not least because from 1960 to 1963 this scholar of religious traditions and former professor of philosophy at M I T was legally exploring hallucinogenic, paranormal experiences alongside a couple of famous colleagues. He was part of Harvard University's research programme into entheogens, which gave him licence to take wacky substances and go to multi-coloured places with infinite dimensions (some of which are described).
Despite all this far-outness, Smith remained a serious student himself, regretting that the programme should have 'careened off course'. Enter Timothy Leary, professor at Harvard's Centre for Personality Research. His pet topic was 'the potential of psychoactivating chemicals for correcting behaviour disorders'; Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors Of Perception and a big fan of mescaline-summoned 'mystical visions', was another cohort.