I highly recommend the book _The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience_ for those interested in serious scholarly research about Ayahuasca and its subjective effects.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Antipodes-Mind-Phenomenology-Exper...

Castaneda was a fraud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda#Reception

http://www.amazon.com/The-Antipodes-Mind-Phenomenology-Exper...

It's rigorous. It has tabular data. It's about ayahuasca phenomenology.

Why is it that so few here actually research psychedelics seriously?

Well, at least in the USA, advocating that someone consume an illegal drug is itself illegal.

However, old people can benefit greatly from the proper use of psychedelic drugs. Certain types of psychedelic experiences, called unitive experiences, have been found to be very effective in alleviating death anxiety. More information can be found through searching but this video should be informative: http://www.maps.org/videos/source/video14.html

Two excellent, little known books about the phenomenology of psychedelic experiences are:

_The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience_ http://www.amazon.com/Antipodes-Mind-Phenomenology-Ayahuasca...

Comments: This is a truly excellent book, it's published by OUP and the scholarship is the best I've ever seen in a book about psychedelics. Benny Shannon is a cognitive psychologist and philosophy and he's personally taken Ayahuasca over 200 times in addition to gathering second hand reports from many informants over years of investigation. In particular, he stresses commonalities between different people's Ayahuasca experiences despite vast cultural differences in their lives as well as the idea that Ayahuasca experiences proceed in sequences reminiscent of a course of schooling.

_The Ecstatic Imagination: Psychedelic Experiences and the Psychoanalysis of Self-Actualization_ http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ecstatic_Imagination...

Comments: This book is also very strong in its own right, although I think that the Antipodes book is superior. In _The Ecstatic Imagination_ Dan Merkur takes a dispassionate, objective phenomenological view of psychedelic experiences. The many, many block quoted experience reports from drug-takers using LSD, mescaline and psilocybin are the best part of this book. Merkur has taken almost all of these reports from published works about psychedelic psychotherapy and they illustrate the diversity and healing potential of psychedelic experiences.