Its hard to imagine more credibility in this subject area. The author is not only a cognitive psychologist but has himself partaken of the ayahuasca brew over a hundred times, and so can offer a unique double perspective of 'inside' (subjective) and 'outside' (objective). The book makes many interesting and fascinating points, covers its terrain with meticulous care, and provides as "complete" a picture of the ayahuasca experience as it is likely possible to write about. I do have a feeling that the author hankers after a Platonic cosmology, as seemingly revealed to him in some of his ayahuasca visions. Of course, it could also be that these are among his deepest and fondest assumptions and that this is why they turn up regularly in his own visions and in those of others. That said, as a repeating motif in the visions, it becomes interesting. I was also somewhat surprised that the author referred, seemingly in sober fashion, to the works of Castaneda, long discredited. This didn't seriously impact his own argument, but it does raise moments of massive double take on the part of the reader which the author may not be aware of. It's widely acknowledged that Castaneda probably drew on authentic anthropological source material, but that his ethnography of "Don Juan" was essentially fictional.



Although I am giving this book five stars and recommending it to anyone seriously interested in the interior cognitive spaces of the ayahuasca experience, I do have one rather strong criticism of the book, and that is in terms of its readability. I appreciate that the author is following an academic model consistent with the anthropological literature. Unfortunately, the real world consequence of this is to render substantial sections of it close to unreadable. This is particularly the case with categories, broken into sub-categories, broken into further sub-categories and so on, and with very frequent references to points that will be covered two chapters on, or one chapter on, while nevertheless being mentioned as we move through. All of this seriously interrupts the reading flow, and (in my opinion) should be moved into a zone of appendices, keeping a traditional textual flow for the reader's experience. At the moment it reads too much like a textbook or index reference. Again, I want to emphasize that my overall opinion of the book is very positive, and at times it is deeply fascinating. Those times, however, are precisely the occasions when the author is in normal textual flow and not in category-chart or appendices mode.

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