Author(s): Madison Margolin

Ram Dass

Exile and Ecstasy sets out to explore the psychedelic path that occupies the crossroads between the Ram Dass movement and Judaism. It's a path of seeking and escape, rebellion and return, medicine and magic. It's a path that ultimately points toward home. Through the perspective of having grown up among "HinJews" in the Ram Dass community and in the 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. Bridging the polar ends of the Jewish and psychedelic worlds, while buttressing the experience with expert reportage, Madison prods at Be Here Now to find its relevance and utility in a new generation. In doing so, she looks at solutions to our lack of presence and offers ways to 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.