Through the perspective of having grown up among "HinJews" in the Ram Dass community and cannabis legalization movement, journalist Madison Margolin takes the reader on a journey inside New York's Jewish counterculture and the Hasidic underground, reconciling her roots, tackling ancestral Jewish trauma, and finding intersectionality between the Jewish and psychedelic experience. Exile and Ecstasy sets out to explore the psychedelic path that occupies the crossroads between the Ram Dass movement and Hasidism. It's a path of seeking and escape, rebellion and return, medicine and magic. Bridging the polar ends of the Jewish and psychedelic worlds, while buttressing the experience with expert reportage, Madison Margolin prods at Be Here Now to find its relevance and utility in a new generation, facing different issues than those Ram Dass faced as a generally well-to-do boomer. In doing so, she looks at solutions to our lack of presence and offers practices that help us integrate our psychedelic experiences in mundane life, as well as in the context of our roots and religious identities. This book is for anyone looking to feel spiritually kindled, to make peace with where they come from, and to reconcile seemingly disparate experiences of spirituality and psychedelics, with traditional religion.

Proposes a theoretically rich treatment of temporality within exile as “gerundive” time. This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present as a “gerundive” mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To explore this, she establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile, but presents a conversation with them in relation to this question that reflects new aspects in their work. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, Time in Exile engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, Sá Cavalcante Schuback reveals new philosophical and theoretical modes to understand what it means to be present in times of exile. “It is very rare that one can find in philosophy a book that has been written neither as a commentary, nor as an exegesis of the authors in question, but rather as an original and thought-provoking reflection in which the author is the main philosophical voice in the book.” — María del Rosario Acosta López, coeditor of Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Fredrich Schiller and Philosophy

"As an art historian, I realize I should emphasize that an accurate historical reconstruction is far more fascinating than imaginary characters and events. In art, however, reality and illusion are often blended into an intoxicating fusion, as to create a profound impact on the viewer. I strive to see beyond the pictorial values and embrace a wider range of references reflected in a work of art. An artwork has so many potential readings: psychological, social, political, sexual, religious, symbolical, and fantasy, and I am truly interested in looking at all these layers and taking all the aspects into consideration. Above all else, I place great emphasis on women's issues intertwined with social, political, and psychological forces as reflected in the arts. I choose works of art and topics that are not widely discussed in popular or scholarly literature, in an attempt to see beyond the demands or limitations of mainstream discourses, in which female identity is constructed by social institutions and practices. In a greater sense, I do not expect that all my readers will be enraptured by my "visual and literary masterpieces," for my primary aim is to disturb the audience, as to provoke thoughts on the female condition, and thus to make people view the feminine in a new light." --Diana Guber

Exile & Ecstasy sets out to explore the psychedelic path that occupies the crossroads between the Ram Dass movement and Hasidism. It's a path of seeking and escape, rebellion and return, medicine and magic. Bridging the polar ends of the Jewish and psychedelic worlds, while buttressing the experience with expert reportage, Madison Margolin prods at Be Here Now to find its relevance and utility in a new generation, facing different issues than those Ram Dass faced as a generally well-to-do boomer. In doing so, she looks at solutions to our lack of presence and offers practices that help us integrate our psychedelic experiences in mundane life, as well as in the context of our roots and religious identities. This book is for anyone looking to feel spiritually kindled, to make peace with where they come from, and to reconcile seemingly disparate experiences of spirituality and psychedelics, with traditional religion.

When Samantha is reunited with her former husband, she is torn between her desire for him and her anger at his lack of faith in her