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This one came in the mail as a gift from a friend, a very, very good friend as it was exactly what I wanted most to read at the time.

Despite the prohibition of research on naturally occuring psychotropic drugs--as opposed to patented pharmaceuticals!--instituted by the Nixon administration in the seventies and the still continuing and unwinnable war on drugs enforced by the DEA et alia, some people continue to be seriously interested in the implications of such altered states of consciousness as relativize ordinary epistemological and ontological presuppositions.

The author, a research scientist at the University of New Mexico Medical Center, represents in this book several stories. One is political, the story of how, over years, was finally able to obtain permission to study DMT, the only known psychedelic naturally produced in the human body. Another is personal and political. He is a believing Anglo-Buddhist, a member of a congregation who found himself treated by his coreligionists like mediaeval mystics tended to be treated by the Vatican. Another is professional. Previous work on sleep and the pineal gland led him to one of the gland's psychoactive products. He was given the necessary clearances because of a record of research and publication which it could be argued led to the topic of this book. Another is his account of this research project itself, the experimental design, the participants (all of whom, ironically, had to be experienced illegal drug users in order to qualify for the study so as to protect the university from lawsuits) and the results.

The most interesting, and ostensibly unexpected, result of the study, a result which led far afield from the awarded grant proposals and governmental permits, was that a significant percentage of subjects went to other worlds, worlds reminiscent of Terence McKenna's stories and stage performances, worlds remiscent, to me, of personal experience and, in one case, to the "gnostic" texts of the first centuries of the last millenium.

It's no big deal to go to other worlds, idiosyncratic ones. We do it every night, virtually all of us, dreaming. The big deal would be if we went, lots of us, to the same worlds, world not clearly derived from this one, worlds similar in ways that cannot be accounted for by similar conditionings of subjects. The claim that his disparate set of subjects did just that makes this book very important indeed.

Note that this is a popular book which attempts to explain some serious biochemistry. It does it well. The nonspecialist reader gets a short, understandable course in neuroanatomy. The footnotes are there for those who want to pursue the vetted, academic papers.