Word: zaehner
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...Around Christ. Most churchmen are duly skeptical about equating an afternoon on LSD with the intuitions of a St. John of the Cross or a Martin Luther. R. C. Zaehner of Oxford, a Roman Catholic and an expert on Eastern religions, holds that the drug-induced visions are simply one of many kinds of preternatural experience, and are qualitatively different from the ecstasies granted mystics. Presbyterian Theodore Gill, president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, wonders whether the drug experience might be a rival rather than a supplement to what conventional religion offers. Says he: "The drugs make...
...Writing in the British Dominican review, Blackfriars, Oxford's professor of Eastern religions and ethics, Robert C. Zaehner, takes apart Novelist Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, in which Huxley proclaims that a drug called mescalin produced in him something like a religious experience. "This is the [familiar] experience of union with nature; it is not union with God," writes Zaehner. "The Doors of Perception cannot ... be classed as a holy book; for holiness implies peace. There is no peace here . . ." Far from approaching the Beatific Vision, Huxley "came nearer than he knew to the gates...
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