Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism

A leisurely, discursive, donnish ramble on science and spiritual homelessness, religious mysticism and its current cartoon in the psychedelic drug cult, the reality of evil and the rare radiance of good (Pope John XXIII, Dietrich Bonhoeffer) in the 20th century, the meanings of death and of faith. The book is just this diverse, diverting and ultimately pointless; the author is an Oxford professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics and a thinking Catholic, and the book was expanded from a series of lectures. Zaehner says that however warm our mystical experiences we must admit the cold truth science has taught us, that the world of nature doesn't really have any sympathy with us, or any Mind at work in it. Then, after proving with lively Orientalist erudition that there is not one mystical experience but many, he gives serious consideration to LSD prophets' claims to the genuine article. He concludes that while there are parallels between Huxley's and Leary's epiphanies and some kinds of religious mysticism - especially Hindu Upanishadic and Tantric - on the whole psychedelics produce rather a kind of expansive delusion warned against by Muslims and resembling manic-depression. Nor do they produce the lasting results with which Zen rewards its devotees' exertions. Zaehner also discusses French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos on confusing the bleak Void with the holy, and concludes with Teilhard de Chardin that death is "God's greatest gift to man" - the only way most of us will shed our selfishness! Zaehner's Concordant Discord (1970), which is frequently referred to here, is the most likely beginning point to fully appreciate this varied, inconclusive, skeptical, witty, moral, concerned, and ultimately Christian mind at work. Both books will appeal mainly to non-mystics interested in mysticism and religious intellectuals. (Kirkus Reviews)