is my story of two trips, one tucked inside the other: A larger literal one, five weeks in Peru beginning the very night I retired, in order to drink two native medicines, ayahuasca and huachuma, in controlled settings; and a shorter, metaphorical one, even more difficult, from the head to the heart.  

Both trips were meant to take on a traumatic episode from my youth.  At age nineteen, working as a deckhand on a Great Lakes iron ore boat, I was tasked with two others to climb down into the hold and paint the inside of the forepeak with aluminum spray paint.  We had no masks or ventilation.  Inhaling fumes was unavoidable.  On my third trip up, at the top of the vertical, 35 foot metal ladder, both boots, their soles by now wet with paint, slipped simultaneously.  What saved my life was a fatigued decision to hook my elbow over the top rung, something I hadn’t done previously.  Pulled up and out by others, I was incapable of talking or acting on my own.  So I was led out on deck, and prodded to lie down on a  hatch cover for fresh air.  I then hallucinated that I did fall.  But not into the hold.  No: I imploded, digested myself, excreted me through the planet–our cultural site of Hell–and into the vastness of space.  I could see our planet off in the distance.  I knew, with a profound certainty, that I would never return.  An eternity in less than an hour.

During my 37 year career as a college English professor, I became intellectually fascinated with where I’d gone.  My mind pursued two tacks.  In one, I framed the hallucination mythologically.  Like Persephone, I’d been to a kind of Hades when I too was young, virginal, largely innocent.  Her name means “bringer of destruction.”  It took me years, but I finally realized that the vision had meaning: I had “digested”--read, destroyed–my youthful, Eagle Scout/Good Boy persona, and expelled it out.  And like Persephone, who returned to Hades yearly, I too would return, first occasionally, with a few youthful LSD and mescaline trips, and finally, ceremonially, with the medicines from what I called “the Green Brain” of the jungle and the mountainous slopes of Peru.  In the second tack, I researched what contemporary scholars of religion and Greek culture were concluding about the Classical world’s longest and most sustained ritual: the Eleusinian Mysteries, dedicated to Demeter, Goddess of Grain–her daughter was Persephone, and Dionysus, God of Wine, Inebriation.  It turned out that they used a potion, the “kykeon,” that contained alkaloids from a fungus that grew on grain, ergot.  Thirty alkaloids have been processed from ergot, the most famous being the 25th, LSD.  All those famous Greeks, together with other noble men and women, spent one ceremonial night tripping out of their minds.

But while that myth provided understanding, it did not heal.  I had deep fears about letting go.  Insomnia was the least of it.  My head would not cede power to what Pascal called “the thought of the heart.”  I did train my body, by taking climbing classes, to manage its fear of heights.  But my heart always got short shrift, as it often does in our career-obsessed, ego-aggrandizing way of life.  Could I let go into a deeper, more caring, more appreciative, me?  Into the domain of the heart?

I knew from youthful experience that psychotropic medicines take you out of your head and out of your body.  But could their sublime and often terrifying images help heal hearts?  This trip, this book, is the story of my quest to answer that question.

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