10 Pieces of Psychedelic Wisdom from Exile and Ecstasy
Madison Margolin's memoir of growing up with Ram Dass and traveling through the Jewish psychedelic underground
Madison Margolin, co-founder of DoubleBlind Magazine, has written a drug memoir rife with the type of good advice you won’t find in the navel-gazing of Michael Pollan.
Here’s a run down of some of her best harm-reduction insights.
#1. Rebbe Nachman “encourages us to harvest joy from the hard work of shifting our perspective to see everything as for the good” (page 84).
#2. It’s “the tradition and the ritual…that serves as the control, helping us to measure how we’ve changed in the interim, and who we are each time we cyclically return” (page 85).
#3. “Because, let’s get one thing straight: there’s no “right way” to have a psychedelic experience (or, for that matter, a religious one, either)” (page 93).
#4. “If we’re truly going to honor the medicine, and our intentions in taking it, then it’s our responsibility to walk that path in our sober, mundane life. If Grandmother told you to do something, it’s not Grandmother, but that realization you came to on your own (with her nudging) that is the medicine. The consciousness is the real medicine” (page 94).
#5. “Too much light, he told me, could shatter one’s vessel—his point being that sober, daily practices, like prayer and keeping kosher, always trumped the psychedelic shortcut to illumination….The basic message according ot rabbinic tradition is that direct spiritual experience is serious, sometimes even dangerous, and should be approached with respect and proper preparation” (page 109).
#6. According to Ram Dass, “The game isn’t to get high; the game is to get free” (page 111).
#7. The philosophy is that it’s better to be happy, even if it means being a fool, than to be unhappy to and ‘normal’” (page 116).
#8. “Doof’s tagline reads, ‘Everybody needs a place where they can go insane peacefully’” (page 118).
#9. “It’s not the substance that elicits a spiritual or healing experience; it’s G-d. The ‘medicine’ simply offers instructions for how your mind and and body can operate differently, in the event of emotional, spiritual, or physical need” (page 138).
#10. DANCE.