TRIPPING INTO RETIREMENT

Plagued by a traumatic image endured at age nineteen, and unable to heal himself intellectually during his academic career, the author turns to South American indigenous psychedelics as the first act of retirement. These medicines, until recently both illegal and culturally suspect, are now gaining a foothold in treatments for traumatized veterans, sexual assault victims, the suicidally depressed, and the religiously dispossessed. But can they also be used to address ordinary hidden issues? Can they unveil 'the reasons of the heart?'After working as an English professor for 37 years, he decided that it was time for him to retire. Despite enjoying his career, the changing cultural expectations regarding the responsibilities of professorship forced him to accept that he 'was drifting out of fashion.' He soon heads to Peru on a quest for personal growth. Retirement, he asserts, strips a person of the excuses they’ve long used to avoid personal problems; for instance, he had never processed a near-death experience he suffered at 19 while working as a deckhand on an ore boat in the Great Lakes region. He felt that it was now time to face his demons and discover what emotional wounds were in need of healing. During a series of guided ayahuasca trips, Seal had a vision that, he believed, went beyond any simple biological response; he felt that he had visited a realm not adequately understood or accepted by Western intelligence. Descriptions of his ayahuasca journey are interspersed with literary theory and analyses of myth, with a particular focus on the story of Persephone. At the end of a series of ayahuasca ceremonies, he was dissatisfied with the progress he had made, although he asserts in retrospect that he was simply not yet ready to accept his healing. He then chose to hike the Chachani volcanic group, where he began to understand that he had to escape his mind and cede power to his heart. He returned home, he says, with a feeling that he’d been reborn.David Seal’s direct, personable style adeptly balances his personal reflections with literary, philosophical, and cultural analysis, which adds depth to readers’ understanding of him as a scholar who sees stories as a means to better understand himself. It also provides valuable context for the hallucinogenic experiences that he experienced. From Socrates and Sophocles to Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad, Seal draws on expert voices in this account, and he does so in a manner that’s accessible but never oversimplified. He also works hard to establish how his youthful experiences influenced his later life. He describes himself as a teenager who was once caught reading Nietzsche, rather than Playboy, and he returns again and again to his time on the ore boat in the Great Lakes. At its strongest moments, this reflection brings the emotional arc of his life to the fore. He notes, for instance, that his time as a literature teacher led him to expect narratives with 'climaxes and ’moments of awakening,’' even if they were not always true to life.  6