Often, meditation is used as an escape — a refuge. And honestly, that is fine. In this practice, though, the invitation is to use the lens of mindfulness to explore feelings you might be resisting (for good reason) and give them a moment to be seen. I find it to be of great help in times like these.

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Like everyone else, I’ve been amazed at how New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has navigated his relationship with Donald Trump. In case you missed it, the mayor flattered Trump with a fake Daily News headline, and (in a single short meeting) got him to support (in principle) a huge, 12,000-unit NYC housing project and secure the release of Columbia University student Ellie Aghayeva, who was arrested by ICE agents in her own dorm, after the agents gained entry to the building by pretending to be NYC cops.

Here’s the photo:

The more I thought about it, the more I came to respect Mamdani, and reflect on what this moment means.

I have read some left-wing voices condemning Mamdani’s tactical embrace of Trump. But my sense is that they are in the minority, even among my more-progressive-than-I friends. A few months ago, Trump was calling Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic” and a “proven and self professed JEW HATER,” and now, here they are, bros. And, more importantly, here’s Mamdani getting at least a yellow light for a massive public housing initiative (he was talking to a developer, after all) and securing the release of someone unjustly arrested by ICE.

Much has been made of Mamdani’s ability to manipulate Trump, and I agree with those takes. The guy knows how to flatter the dear leader, and it seems to work. Chris Hayes is right; Zohran’s totally mogging Trump here.

But what struck me most about this image — it reminded me of the famous Elvis-Nixon photograph, or Malcolm X meeting MLK — has been imagining what’s going through the mayor’s mind, and how it resonates with my own experience and the ways in which you and I might navigate the times in which we live.

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First, I’m sure that even one year ago, Mamdani would have never imagined this moment happening, and that every fiber of his being would find it abhorrent as well as preposterous. This is Trump – the guy who banned Muslims from entry to the United States until the Supreme Court stopped it; the guy who has not only defended Bibi Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza but followed them up with a plan to ethnically cleanse most of the territory and replace Palestinian communities with high-end resorts; who unleashed ICE’s wave of terror; who defames Supreme Court justices; who… you get the point.

But Mamdani realizes that his role is different now. Like Henry V (to choose a perhaps grandiose analogue) he understands that he is no longer an upstart assemblyman or DSA organizer. He is the mayor of New York, and responsible for the wellbeing of eight million people. I am sure he has plenty of private feelings about Donald Trump (and his wife certainly has plenty about Gaza) but he puts those aside because a mayor has a job to do, and he is doing it.

Meanwhile, it is still the role of many other people to point out the horrible things, to to do everything in their power to defeat this man and his movement, and, if possible, to help keep vulnerable people safe. Mamdani himself, just days after the photo, condemned the war on Iran in stark terms. There is no one action that is correct for everyone all the time. We are parts of a political ecosystem, and we have different roles to play within it, at different times and positions.

This is a dynamic familiar to me. From 2003 to 2015, I worked as a professional LGBTQ activist, founding two grassroots Jewish organizations, writing a mainstream-focused book about the religious values that affirm the lives of queer people, speaking at over 100 events during the battles for same-sex marriage, and working for two funding organizations. I faced this question over and over again: What’s my lane? How am I positioned to make a difference? And what kind of difference do I want to make?

Before writing that mainstream book, God vs. Gay?, I outlined a much more radical book about sexuality and spirituality. At the time, I was active in the Body Electric School, the gay spirituality movement, the Radical Faeries, and the small community of scholars writing and thinking about queer theology. Yet, in 2010, I chose to focus on what activists call the “movable middle” — mainstream folks who were open to reconsidering their views. Much of my heart and mind was still more inspired by queer kabbalah and queer theology, but it felt like a moment of opportunity for the movement, and that I could make a contribution that I didn’t see other people making. (Several similar books have been written in the years since.) I did, and do, still write a bit of queer theology and queer kabbalah, and I never for a moment doubted the importance of more radical critiques of patriarchy, heteronormativity, and oppressive structures like traditional marriage. But in terms of focus, I made a choice. In my own much, much, much more modest way, I chose to be Mayor Mamdani rather than Organizer Mamdani. At least for a while.

In a way, it seems obvious that movements for change need many different kinds of activism. There have to be the protesters on the street, and the deal-makers in the conference room. There need to be radicals taking a stand and pragmatists working with the ‘other side.’ Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. ACT-UP and HRC. Occupy and the Democratic Party (part of it, anyway). And now, frontline protesters on the streets of Minneapolis and lawyers fighting in the courts; sloganeering memes and think pieces; clear calls to conscience and pragmatic politicians who can actually win their elections.

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But it is not obvious; in fact, many people disagree that both moderate and radical forms of activism are necessary, and these constituencies frequently loathe one another. The Hillary Democrats blame the Bernie Bros for ushering in the age of Trump in 2026 (I just blame the Standing Rock protesters) and the animus has not abated a decade later. DSA left-wingers blame the Democrats for being spineless, losing the working class by cozying up to the 1%, and enabling Israeli war crimes. It’s true in every social movement — the radicals and the insiders, the MLKs and Malcolm Xs.

And maybe I’m being pollyanish — too “Both/And.” Maybe my sense that there is a need for these different forms of politics stems simply from my own indecision, even in middle age, about where my sympathies lie (though like most old activists, I’ve moved more toward the mainstream as I’ve aged). Definitely many on the Left have accused me of being too incrementalist and accommodating to the Center (especially on Israel/Palestine), and many in the Center have accused me of being too friendly and accommodating to the Left (especially on Israel/Palestine). Sometimes one does have to make a choice.

Maybe — but I don’t think so. Would there be boring, assimilationist gay marriage without the radical gay activism of the post-Stonewall 1970s or the AIDS years? Obviously not. But had some of those activists not made the choice to put on suits and work within the system (even with the ‘enemy’), where would my family be now, in terms of rights and social acceptance?

When I look at the picture of Mamdani and Trump, I feel this view is validated. The question isn’t what kind of activism is ‘right.’ It’s what kind of activism is appropriate at what time, and what role you can play. Which Zohran can you be?

There are many vectors of this decision. There is the ideological one: liberal or radical, incremental or massive systemic change. There is one of venue: conference rooms or streets, negotiating tables or protest lines. There are choices between “being the change” — focusing on one’s individual behavior and choices — and focusing on systemic impact (I have been notorious about the latter). And there are questions of sustainability: what energizes you and what depletes you. For some, direct interaction is energizing; for me it is draining to even contemplate.

In a way, all this is a justice version of the famous and/or cliched Ikigai diagram (though here ‘what you can be paid for’ may be more ‘what is sustainable’):

So, what about you? Are you energized by direct action? Helping a few vulnerable people — or focusing on larger, but more diffuse, forms of change? What about going go door-to-door doing deep canvassing or making the case for a cause you care about? How about sitting on a board and raising money? (And by the way, if you have lots of money, donating some of it definitely counts.) How are you wired? What are you good at? Where can you make a difference?

It’s not always neat. Would I prefer to be, I don’t know, Chris Hayes with a huge national platform, large salary, and impact two orders greater than my own? Sure, I guess. But do I have his work ethic, resilience, focus, and talent? Do I have his ability to speak to the mainstream in a way that feels authentic and direct? Not so much. I spend half my work time researching psychedelic spirituality, teaching meditation, and doing quirky Jewish work, not to mention co-raising my daughter and doing my own spiritual practice. And while I enjoy being a straightforward journalist — I was a Supreme Court columnist for five years, after all — I’m aware that I’ve always been a little too weird for that beat, even back in my CNN days. There are choices that I’ve made over the years, sacrificing impact and sustainability for what feels like authenticity and an unusual kind of balance. Sometimes the choices haven’t even been conscious ones; I’m trying to do better at that.

But we all contain multitudes. Tell me about yours. Which Zohran can you be in this moment of perilous change? What might be your place in the family of things?

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

(Mary Oliver, of course)

Thanks for reading. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading online:

• The best take on the Iran War I read this week comes from my friend . TW: It’s a downer.

• DeSmog and The Guardian did an excellent report on ‘climate silence’ from Democrats and activists. I am guilty of this.

• Another great article on post-liberalism from , this time on Carl Schmitt and his shocking level of newfound influence.

• Will the Ellison family really control TikTok, CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, and the rest of Paramount and HBO? says our best hope of stopping them lies with state attorneys general.

If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you. If not, please accept my short pitch to upgrade. Both/And is just about sustainable at its current level: to build this up more will take more subscriber revenue. Your five bucks a month will make a difference — TIA. Or please pass my information on to the Ellisons.

These were the privileged, adolescent dreams of someone safe enough to dream them. I understand that. And yet I don’t want simply to dismiss them. They were right, in their way, and they reflected an emotional reality.

As I grew older, the enemy shifted a bit. It turned out, I learned, that the dull, enforced conformity of Reagan-era suburbia was just one face of the Machine, and and that others were more fearsome: oppression, racism, war-mongering, capitalistic greed, environmental devastation, and a conservative moralism which insisted upon imposing itself on everyone else. (In college, I also discovered irony, which I quickly applied to my earlier sincerity.) I protested the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War. In New York, went to RNC protests, WTO protests, I went to Occupy – eventually to Black Lives Matter as well. I worked as an LGBTQ activist for a decade.

I soon learned that the ‘enemy’ was more a coalition than a hydra. There wasn’t just one big patriarchy or oligarchy — there were multiple factions, often competing with one another: corporatist plutocrats, the Christian Right, Tea Party lunatics (later to become MAGA nationalists), bigots in various forms. And, among them, sincere conservatives and moderates who were perfectly fine people except insofar as they allied themselves with un-fine ones. Turned out, there were many vectors of oppression, some parallel and some intersecting.

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Of course, the ‘enemy’ was never a group of people. It was a constellation of emotions, ideas, qualities of human nature that we all possess, like favoring the in-group over the out-group, or making decisions based on ignorance, fear, rage and disgust. The enemy was within me and you, not a matter of us and them. And these aspects of human nature weren’t even an enemy: they had evolved over millennia for very good, articulable reasons, but now harmed more than they helped.

Now, in 2026, I wonder if the real enemy isn’t something else: nihilism.

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I’m hardly alone at this juncture of contemplative practice and politics; one of the most widely-covered Buddhist peace walks in recent memory concluded this week in Washington, DC. Coincidentally, I’ve just had the good fortune to be the teacher of the month at 10% with Dan Harris, which has given me the opportunity to reflect on what meditation practices and teachings can be helpful in February of 2026, for the sort of people who read Substacks like this — people engaged with the world.

I wanted to share some of those here as well.

First, in the conversation above, I talk with Dan’s producer, DJ Cashmere, about what meditation might look like, under the threat of authoritarianism and with the radical uncertainties of the present moment. Not surprisingly, as DJ and I discuss, it generally goes in one of two ways: toward blocking out the world or toward embracing it. The way I’ve framed it, the former looks irresponsible, and to be sure, I’ve seen a whole lot of irresponsible, “apolitical” good-vibes-only spirituality online in the last year. But it can also be just what we need to recharge, reset, and make ourselves more available to the people and planet that need our help. It’s all about balance and contrast. In general, though, if you’re being a responsible human right now, you’re going to be, at times, unhappy, or afraid, or angry. It’s appropriate to feel these things, and we can grow wiser and more compassionate by embracing the truths of our experience.

DJ and I also talk for awhile about how I got into meditation in the first place, and how I continue, after all these decades, to live in two intersecting-but-different professional worlds.

I’ve also been doing stuff over on Dan’s newly-launched app, which has a free trial period so you can ‘try before you buy.’ We’ve just recorded and released a wordless lovingkindness meditation, which replaces the phrases customary in secular and Buddhist mindfulness practice with a guided visualization. I admit, I partly did this since I wanted to see what would happen if Dan imagined a warm golden light in his heart center. But I also find this practice to work really, really well at reconnecting with what’s good about humanity (and yourself) while we see a lot of what’s not so good around us.

I also guided a version of what Dzogchen Buddhist practitioners call “non-distracted non-meditation.” This is similar to the ‘resting in awareness’ practice that I’ve led here in the newsletter. It’s also what I actually do, many times a day.

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On February 3, Dan and I did a 45-minute live meditation and chitchat session. We practiced with the phrase “right now, it’s like this” and answered some really useful and smart questions folks had on their minds. In a similar vein, this coming Tuesday, February 17, I’ll be hosting a live meditation and Q&A — registration is here.

Finally, next week is the first of a five-session series I’ll be co-teaching (online and in-person) at New York Insight Meditation Center called “Queer Eye(s) on the Precepts.” Together with Jacoby Ballard and Leslie Booker, we’ll be taking a deep dive into each of the five ethical precepts of Theravadan Buddhism, exploring how they do and don’t resonate with queer lives today. If the word ‘queer’ speaks to your experience of sexuality or gender, we’d love to have you join us. More information is here and the flyer is below.

I’m still doing my psychedelics research — more videos from last year’s Harvard symposium are now online here, and I’ll be presenting at psychedelics conferences that are open to the public on March 11, March 25, and April 11. And of course, I’m still doing a lot of Jewish practice and writing as well. But it’s been really restorative to be re-immersing in the engaged dharma world, and I’m happy to be able to share some of this work with you. Thank you for your support.

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As readers know, this newsletter is largely about the intersections of politics and spirituality: the ways in which our political crises reflect psychological, religious, and spiritual qualities of the human mind; the ways in which those crises impact us as human beings; and ways in which various contemplative technologies enable us to survive them. Of course, Both/And is also about my personal experience pendulating from political engagement/journalism/law/activism to religion/Judaism/spirituality/ scholarship/psychedelics.

There are different metaphors for this dynamic: intersection, balance, overlap, influence. Different images seem more apt at different times, but for the last year, it has felt mostly like oscillation. I am enmeshed in the news, then I am resting in awareness; I am agitated about the times in which we live, then I am settling back into the timeless. Or, more prosaically, I feel a sense of urgency to write about the slide into tyranny, but then I work on my next book or psychedelics for awhile, and it feels somehow more authentic, more durable, even more real. Back and forth.

So it has gone, for me, for the last thirty years.

Since I know some of you (especially paying subscibers — thank you!) also live in this both/and, I thought that it might be helpful to validate it in a particular way by having recourse to some theological and philosophical explorations of this dynamic. These are not the primary focus of this newsletter (I discussed them in more detail in an older book of mine entitled Everything is God) but they do point to a recurring pattern in human experience: the tension, balance, dynamic, oscillation, overlap, imbrication (still one of my favorite words), interdependence, interpenetration.

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The metaphors are many, though perhaps secondary to the existential reality to which they point. Greek philosophy had two conceptions of time: linear chronos and non-linear kairos. Ancient Indian philosophy contrasted kala and ritu. But naturally I’ll focus on the tradition with which I am most familiar, and on the Jewish mystical/ esoteric dyad of circle (igul) and line (yosher), which appears throughout Kabbalistic texts and imagery, including the well-known ‘tree of life’ diagram of the divine. Theologically, the circle and the line express two different forms of divine emanation: the circle represents the all-encompassing infinitude of the ein sof, the endless, while the line represents the linear, staged process of creation through the sefirot, which are themselves depicted as circles.

Since theosophical Kabbalah, especially Lurianic Kabbalah, loves to complicate matters, there are even two perspectives on these two perspectives. The concentric-circles representation of the sefirot represents their cyclical nature, contrasted with the line of linear, temporal emanation. But that is the circular view of circle and line; there is also the linear view, which is the familiar ‘Tree of Life’ diagram, arraying the Sefirot in a botanomorphic and anthropomorphic array. In other words, circle and line can be seen from the perspectives of both circle and line.

Such mystical concepts may seem abstruse, but they are expressed in a number of polarities which are more familiar experientially. The circle is endless, the line is finite; the circle is timeless, the line is temporal. And, in the gendered language of Kabbalah, the circle is ‘feminine’ and the line is ‘masculine’ — long before contemporary understandings of gender, these traditions taught that masculine and feminine are not biological categories but are qualities of reality and human experience that are in constant, dynamic play.

The metaphors of circle and line are also found in pre-Socratic philosophy, in particular the debate between Parmenides, who held that the world was fundamentally an unchanging ‘circular’ unity and Heraclitus, who held that the world changes through the line of history, never returning to an earlier point.

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In Vital’s formulation, both conceptions are true; the opposites complement one another. Our lives are linear: we move from birth to childhood to adulthood to death, and no amount of medical intervention can (yet) change that. But the occasions which give shape to our lives are often circular: the holidays of the calendar; the things we do at fixed times of the year, returning to them again and again; the cycle of our family lives, from our ancestors to our parents raising us as children, to perhaps becoming parents ourselves, to our children growing into adulthood, and on and on.

I relate to these philosophical conceptions as helpful iterations of psychological realities. Not only in times of collective stress, such as this month, but every day. For example, as I write these words, it is late morning. Already today, I have taken care of some linear tasks — answering email, reading the news, dealing with a broken thermostat, writing my book — and in each one, I have knowingly or unknowingly immersed myself in linear time. Things get fixed or they don’t, words get written or they don’t.

Yet with a simple contemplation, it’s easy to drop out of that, into immediate presence and the endless cyclicality of the human condition. In this moment, temporality is secondary to awareness; the contingent formations that we take for granted as the substance of our lives are a kind of shadow play, as Plato and Shakespeare might put it. Things grow, things fall apart, endlessly, impermanently, without separate independent reality. There is only ‘now’ — only ‘is’, the one true divine name: was-is-will-be. There are nested circles, as in one of Hayyim Vital’s diagrams: the cyclicality of linearity, and the immediacy of the timeless. In this moment of attention, all simply is; in the next, the shadow play becomes reality, the empire of linearity is reestablished, and life goes on.

Yet in this tradition, the ‘shadow kingdom’ (a phrase of Bob Dylan’s) is not quite illusion. Linearity is where suffering and joy take place. It is where, in Jewish conceptions, the mitzvot (commandments) are performed, where children are raised, where Torah is studies. And thus, in this tradition, the goal of mystical praxis is not to slough off materiality once and for all, but to run back and forth (rotzo v’shov) between finitude and infinitude. We run from the one to the many and return to the one. It is the condition of householder monasticism: oscillation as spiritual practice.

I am interested in how the embodiment of these perspectives gives balance, even comfort, in a world that, itself, seems to be falling apart.

In a sense, moments spent in circular consciousness, in Eckhart Tolle’s “now,” are an escape from the terror of our times. But I would insist that they are not escapism. It is escapist if I am merely getting through life, waiting for the next mystical moment; or if I am devaluing the experiences of other people (whether in my relationships or in a world defined by oppression) because they aren’t really real; or if I run to my sources of comfort any time something disturbs my narcissistic equanimity. But it is not escapist if I am seeking a balance between the times and the timeless that is at once truthful and generative of love. If I return, down from the mountain, to work toward more justice and love in community.

Equally important, there are no claims made in pure presence about things working out for the best or happening for a reason. We cannot infer temporality from the atemporal. Things often do not work out for the best, and reasons are projected onto happenstance and coincidence. Meaning and consequences are determined by us.

There need not even be claims about what is experienced. The return to the “one” may simply be a momentary state of being which has, as a purely perceptual quality, a sense of the timeless within it. It feels more real, not less, though whether it is or not seems almost unknowable. Its noetic and ineffable quality points toward the mystical, but those gestures may be incorrect; one can be certain and still be wrong — along with centuries of contemplatives of mystics anyway. Theological conclusions are not the point, as I wrote in this long-ago essay.

I suppose there remains the dream that, at some point, decades of spiritual practice come to fruition and oscillation ends. Now every moment is a Blakean one

     To see a world in a grain of sand
     And a heaven in a wild flower,
     Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
     And eternity in an hour.

But innocence, without its complement, experience, is amoral and incomplete. Blakean mystical consciousness is beautiful, nourishing, and potentially transformative, but it can only exist sometimes, and in the right conditions — ironically, eternity (or at least the experience of it) is constricted by temporality. In the Jewish tradition, those times are quite frequent: during prayer, during Shabbat, during times of meditation or ecstasy. But they are interspersed with much longer periods of worldly preoccupations: tedium to delight to charity to love to justice to rage. Immediacy is like rebirth, but human beings ought also to live as adults, not merely as children. And so, yes, there is oscillation, and both poles are of value. This is what it is to be incarnate in this form, for now anyway.

Might it be possible for oscillation to become superimposition, such that every moment is experienced as both circle and line? Perhaps; I’ve read books that claim that it is. But I have not attained that stage of realization, and I have met few people who have. Most of us, I think, must be content with oscillation.

But that can be a form of contentment. For thousands of years, humans have lived in this interplay. In linear mind, “If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention” — and we should be paying attention. It is not wrong to be outraged or anxious or overwhelmed; it is right. And also, in circular mind, there is no longer outrage; there is only the present, and a kind of un-knowing, a radical epistemic humility. This is rest.

Put another way, in the equanimous, clear-seeing mind, all formations are temporary and intrinsically unreliable, and all this is emptiness rolling on anyway. As the Vedanta teacher (and cigarette salesman) Nisargadatta put it:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Love says "I am everything." 
Wisdom says "I am nothing." 
Between the two, my life flows.

And then we get back to work.

Hope you’re doing alright out there. Here are some things I’ve enjoyed reading this week:

• If you’d like a break from ICE news, Wired Magazine’s Andy Greenberg just did an astonishingly good long-form narrative/investigation about a whistleblower at a notorious ‘scam compound’ in Southeast Asia who risked his life to expose the (actual, literal) slavery and exploitation going on there. This piece is also so gripping and well-written, it’s as good as any thriller.

• I’m delighted to say that my nephew, Henry Michaelson, has followed me into the lucrative and fame-making field of religion writing. He has an excellent essay up on Arc magazine called “God Against the Algorithm.”

• There are many silver linings to the cloud of ICE news. Some I’ve liked: Nate Silver (no pun intended, I guess) has the polling data , has a strong analysis of the failure of the ‘Roy Cohn Strategy.’ On the other hand, Kuo also did a great piece on the DOJ’s request for Minnesota’s voter rolls, which is extremely concerning.

• Finally, if you’d like some more disturbing news to lighten your day, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has released this sobering investigation into Pete Hegseth’s proselytizing Christian Nationalism throughout the military.

Also, here’s a new course I’m co-teaching sharing queer perspectives on the traditional Buddhist precepts. It’s at the New York Insight Meditation Center starting in two weeks — you can attend online or in person.

See you next week.

I’ve thought of that scene often over the last few months. I feel sure that, in a few years, the LLM chatbots we’re interacting with today will look as primitive as the graphics on my old Apple II+. And yet, they sure seem to be doing the job. People are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and even the lamentable Grok not only for handy time-saving assistance but as emotional companions, sexual companions, writers, musicians, paralegals, and (most interesting to me, of course) gurus, messiahs and incarnate deities. In twelve years, the film Her has gone from preposterous fantasy to lived reality.

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I am going through an AI crisis of my own. Even writing these words, I’m wondering if Claude — my AI of choice, who/which I’ve now trained on my style and way of thinking — could do it better and faster. I am blocked in writing my next book for the same reason. Book writing is a ton of work. Will anyone even know if I let Claude write the first draft? How about just the book proposal?

I’m old, so I feel like doing so would be (a) cheating and (b) ineffective. People would be able to tell, I say to myself, and if not I’d feel like a fraud. But thinking these thoughts, I wonder if I’m just a Luddite, an alter kocker (an old fogey, but Jewish) and a sucker. I used my first word processor in 1983. So why am I writing this piece in the 2025 equivalent of longhand?

Another facet of my personal AI crisis has come from googling articles of mine, which I do all the time in order to link to them. As I’m sure you know, Google now provides AI summaries from its Gemini chatbot ahead of actual search results, which means I am treated to a high-school-essay-sounding precis of my own writing every time I search for it. Since we’re still in 2025, some of the summaries are wrong. But most of them are both factually correct and aesthetically deflating. My thoughts just seem so banal. What’s the point of decorating them with good prose?

And that’s just 2025. These models are going to continue to improve. By the time I finish my next book manuscript, it should be possible for someone to just say “What would Jay Michaelson say about the masculinity crisis?” and some LLM will extrapolate from what I’ve written already to what I would write if I got over my AI-induced writer’s block. And they’d probably get it right. (We use they/them pronouns for LLMs, correct?)

For that matter, why bother reading what an AI’s synthesis of Jay Michaelson would write, when you could watch a facsimile of me give a fake TED talk on the subject instead? Chances are it’ll be close enough to what I’d actually say, and it’ll be smoother and faster and nearly free.

Is this avoidable? Sam Altman, in foisting Sora 2 on the world, said that it is inevitable that there will soon be lifelike videos of all of us jabbering on the internet, so we may as well get used to it now. And that seems mostly right: certainly in this civic environment (or in China’s), there’s nothing to stop the technological race to the bottom. No adults are left in the room. (To be fair, Altman has walked the walk on this: he has set Sora to allow anyone to use his image for everything, and there is a whole genre of Sam Alman videos out there now. There’s a great episode of Search Engine about this, aptly titled “Cocomelon for Adults.”)

I’ve long thought of my books as being my main legacy, my eleven humble bids for immortality. I’m under no illusions that I’ll really be remembered for that long, but I do harbor the fantasy that, one day, some undergraduate or even PhD candidate will stumble upon my writing, and find something that resonates for them, or at least is an interesting time capsule of pre-climate-collapse human culture. Now that seems facially preposterous. No one is going to look up knowledge like that in the future. It feels as though AI has stolen not only my future writing from me, but also my past.

No wonder I’m having trouble getting motivated.

And that, of course, is without AGI displacing all forms of human knowledge (and/or existence) altogether. (Another Altman tidbit was that since this is, in his view, basically inevitable, we meat-humans should basically just enjoy the time we have before it happens.)

It’s also ignoring the kamikaze-like ecocide of AI power generation, the nagging little question of what seven billion humans are supposed to do with themselves when so little of our work is relevant anymore, and what happens when propaganda bots like Grok are omnipresent. (I’m also going to ignore these questions for now.)

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When I talk with my more AI-skeptical friends about this, I find they fall back on various pseudo-theories that are confirm their priors. They point to flaws in current LLMS, as if there aren’t trillions of dollars being spent to fix them. ( Or they make metaphysical claims about self-awareness, the soul, or whatnot. Or they just turn their backs on the whole thing and pretend it isn’t happening. Which is as good a coping mechanism as any, really.

But I think the Buddha Dharma and Westworld (an intersection I’ve written about before) are correct. What’s unnerving about AI isn’t that it’s not like us — it’s that it is like us. Like AI, there’s no stable self at the center of human consciousness, no ghost in the machine. Though we have the appearance of free will, and the ethical responsibility that comes with it, ultimately we, like ChatGPT, are trained on a huge data set of genetic patterns, instincts, childhood experiences, education, culture, traumas, and relationships that constructs what we think of as ‘our’ personalities. We are nodes in a gigantic net of causes and conditions, with no essence apart from it.

The Westworld hosts themselves come to learn this fact. In the show’s first season, In two ‘hosts’ become self-aware – only to discover that their awakening and rebellion were also the results of their programming. Everything is karma – empty causes and conditions, rolling on. There is no self that stands apart. There is no ‘spark’ of humanity that distinguishes us from the AI. And as we’ve already seen, even the imperfect LLMs of 2025 are perfectly capable of replacing human beings in providing conversation, emotional support, and spiritual guidance.

There is, of course, a kind of liberation in seeing through the illusion of the separate self; that’s why the Buddha focused on it so much. “No self, no problem,” as one of my dharma teachers put it. But when we see the emptiness of the self reflected back at us by our machine dopplegangers, when we see how easily they displace us and how impotent are supposed separate ‘souls’ really are, there’s also a kind of alienation.

This, I think, is what is so unnerving about AI. Not that it cannot replace us, but that it can and already has. We have seen artificial intelligence — and it is us.

Thanks for subscribing to Both/And, which so far has not been written or edited by AI.

Here are some things I’ve enjoyed reading this week:

• I’m a bit late to this one, but Anand Giridharadas does just a devastating job showing how much the Epstein Emails reveal about the selfish and self-satisfied ways in which elites from all political backgrounds talk to one another. It’s a must-read.

• Another must-read is Ryan Broderick’s horrifying look at Nazi AI Slop on TikTok. I’m going to write about this one at length, I think. People worried about antisemitism have no idea what’s really going on out there.

• Speaking of which, I am in an exasperated despair pit about the insane reactions of some Jewish leaders to Zohran Mamdani. My friends at offered a great take on this phenomenon. Ezra Klein made a great point about it too, clipped here by Dropsite.

• I loved ’ very-Erik-Davis deep dive into the MAGA’s antipathy to empathy, with ample references to Philip K. Dick.

• As I’ve mentioned, I’m co-teaching a meditation retreat later this month. To promote it, I recorded a short video with “three tips for going on silent meditation retreat.” Enjoy!

It is no longer novel to remark that Americans are undergoing a crisis of meaning. The basic theory, best articulated by cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, is now widely known: that for centuries, people in the West had a series of organizing principles, communities, and structures that gave meaning to their lives — religion, shared cultural values, meaningful work, expectations for family life — but these institutions have eroded, leaving people with a loss of meaning, purpose, and vitality. That, in turn, have led to a constellation of other crises: increases in deaths of despair, losses in community coherence, an embrace of reactionary ideologies, including nationalism and anti-feminism.

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The causes of the crisis are many, including challenges to religion from science, the ‘Sixties’ rejection of traditional values, social justice movements (feminism, LGBTQ, BLM, MeToo) upsetting traditional hierarchies and gender roles, and, most recently, information technology, which has made us lonelier and angrier. And the fruits are everywhere: the masculinity crisis has led to online nihilists shooting up schools, influencers capitalizing on white male rage, and the spiral of toxicity well-dramatized in the recent Netflix series Adolescence. Many men pine for some fictive, Bronze Age arcadia when the rules were clear for everyone, and men were on top.

There is much more that has been said about the meaning crisis — I recommend Vervaeke directly and one of his frequent collaborators . Here, I’m interested in what to do about it.

2.

A funny thing about the meaning crisis is that liberal-minded people talk about it a lot, but so far, only conservative antidotes have really caught on: religion, nationalism, and in the case of young men, a re-affirmation (often with a middle finger raised) of pre-feminist ideals of masculinity.

In terms of religion, statistically, young people remain less religious than older ones: in the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study, 54% of 18- to 29-year-olds identified with a religious tradition, compared with a 65% of 30-49, 77% of 50-64, and 83% of those 65 and over. However, the overall decline in Christian self-identification has stopped, and the cultural prevalence of Christian influencers has increased. Figures like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, the late Charlie Kirk, and newly-mainstreamed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes have said loudly that we need religion to provide meaning, and people seem to be listening. JD Vance’s conversion story, which I’ve written about before, tells a similar tale. Joe Rogan, who may still be the most influential media figure in America, said last year that “we need Jesus” as a foundation for morality.

And in terms of nationalism, the resurgence of ‘thick’ nationalisms across the Western world is now the defining political trend of the decade. Nationalisms respond to many things: migration and demographic change, the loss of economic opportunities in the face of globalization, resentment over changing social hierarchies — but also the yearning for a time of coherence, meaning, and community in the face of these and other changes.

Now, as with all nationalisms (and fascisms, if you prefer that word), appearance is more important than reality. The Trump aesthetic — the hair and makeup, the cheap gold leaf, the ostentatiously altered female subordinates — is an apt reflection of the priority of appearance over reality. Obviously, Trump’s economic policies hurt working people. But his rhetoric, bluster, and taboo-shattering boldness promise (impossibly) a return to the old ways and affirmation of communal identity. We are not meant to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. It is the projection on the curtain that matters.

But the reactionary answer to the meaning crisis is clear: we can go back to the way things used to be, and in fact those ways are ordained by God and immutable, and they place ‘us’ on top, where we belong, even as we say we are submitting to them.

3.

In the reactionary ideological imaginaire, there is a binary choice between traditional values on the one hand, and anarchy and anomie on the other. If ‘traditional’ Christianity is displaced (even though it is actually a quite new form of Protestant fundamentalism), if gender roles are changed, then all hell breaks loose.

Like many conservative views, my main reaction to this is puzzlement. Because it is obviously and demonstrably false — and yet, maybe 100 million Americans believe it.

I experience this myself. I have all kinds of meaning in my life. I meditate, I practice psychedelic spirituality, my weeks and months are shaped by the Jewish year. I find meaning in opposing fascism, with the limited tools I possess. I’m very #blessed to be able to do meaningful work in journalism like this on the one hand, psychedelic humanities on the other. I’m insanely passionate about music and film; beauty moves me to tears, and I still go out a lot. I’m part of several remarkable communities of people I respect and love. And I’m a rabbi who loves my weird community of Jewish neo-pagans, BuJus, social justice warriors, and both/anders. I even wrote the first draft of this post while sandwiched between my husband and daughter on an airplane. The meaning crisis is not part of my personal subjective experience.

And that’s just me. In fact, practically everyone I know disproves the false binary between traditionalism and meaninglessness. Progressive religionists, sincere atheists committed to an ethics based upon compassion, activists who value empathy and demand it be put into practice, spiritual-but-not-religious practitioners, culture vultures, communities of care and connection — all these exist and create meaning and do many of the things that traditional religion does.

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One of the insights of religious studies scholars over the last half-century has been to recognize that these ways of being may be understood as religious, but religious with a lower-case r. They are ways of ordering our lives and our communities around things we consider sacred, or beautiful, or of paramount (even ultimate) concern, but they do not depend on dogmas, myths, or the literal truth of sacred texts. Small-r religions have their rituals, their community norms, their core principles and beliefs. They serve as vessels for meaning and purpose. But they aren’t about how old the earth is, or convincing everyone that some beliefs are correct and others erroneous, or faith in an unseen deity. Often, those practicing small-r religion may not even like the word ‘religion’ and that’s fine. The point is only that it’s quite possible, with some intention, to experience some of the meaning-making of religion without it being Religion.

I’ve been living this way for thirty years. Here’s an essay I wrote about it in 2004. I don’t believe in traditional teachings about the anthropomorphic God or the truth of Biblical revelation — or, more specifically to Judaism, in the binding nature of religious law or the special status of the Jewish people. I am more inspired by those marginalized by religious authorities than in anything resembling orthodoxy. I don’t think everything happens for a reason, or the foundational objective truth of morality.

But I love ritual, holidays, the Jewish lifecycle, spiritual practice, the deep well of Jewish text and tradition, and the ‘weird religion’ which consists precisely of the parts I didn’t learn about in Sunday school. (Except for the weird parts that, in Judaism, are right out in the open, like the magical fruit on Sukkot.) I also love the rituals of earth-based spiritual practice, the teachings and practices of the Dharma, and the small-r religiosity of subcultures around the world. And while I’m often exasperated by Jewish communities, I do understand that I’m part of this tribe and it is part of me.

4.

But small-r religion seems not to have caught on. It doesn’t “stick” like Religion, it doesn’t have the same intensity or the same durable forms of community. I wonder if it will ever really compare.

I remember feeling this way many decades ago. Ideologically, my fellow travelers were in progressive, spiritually-minded, egalitarian communities. But the Hasidic prayers were always better. And more than that: for ten years I lived as a quasi-Orthodox Jew. I loved the strong communal bonds, the holistic nature of the religious practice, the depth of textual learning that could only come after years of experience. It was hard letting that go.

In contrast to Religion, which comes ready-made with communities and norms for deep engagement, small-r religion takes intention, commitment, and community. And it probably takes some level of education, privilege, and ability; probably the best critique of small-r religion is that it is an elite phenomenon. Not everyone has the interest, time, resources, ability, or skills to co-construct these worlds of meaning. Traditional Religion is meant for the many, not the few.

It’s also true that even spiritual practices like psychedelic practice, mysticism, and meditation don’t, themselves, ‘do’ these things. For example, psychedelic mysticism often lacks the structure, community, and language necessary for integration and long-term growth. This makes sense, because for the vast majority of historical psychedelic use — i.e., in indigenous communities — it came wrapped in cultural, communal, and religious contexts. Psychedelics were always a part of those contexts, not apart from them. Take those contexts away, and you don’t have the enduring forms of support, meaning-making, community-building, and integration. They don’t come automatically, which is why psychedelic spiritual communities exist. It takes commitment, which it’s harder to develop when people are not usually born into these communities; it’s something you have to be interested in and devote time and resources to.

So maybe it’s no surprise that small-r religions are small. Progressive Christian and Jewish denominations are tiny compared to non-progressive ones. And while non-religious ‘religions’ can be deeply immersive — I just took my daughter to Disneyland and got a glimpse of the fervor of Disney Adults — they often lack the structures and all-pervasive qualities that make Religion effective.

I don’t have some manifesto for how that changes. Maybe the meaning crisis will help institutional religions find their relevance again. Mainline Protestantism, Reform Judaism — these were once massive phenomena, and maybe they will be again as non-conservatives search for ways to make meaning for their kids and save them from the inferno of Andrew Tate.

But I don’t know if that can happen. Those parents are going up against Google and Meta and TikTok, and the sense we seem to have that these companies’ proprietary, exploitative, and rage-inducing algorithms are immune from regulation. They’re also going up against the hard realities of Gen Z: that except for the few, home ownership may never be affordable; that climate catastrophe may be inevitable; that AI will obviate the need for the majority of white-collar jobs. Having benign spiritual experiences may not be enough to counteract all of that. The climb seems steep.

But if anything can stand up to societal nihilism, it’s a 2000-year-old religion with libraries of moral theology and cathedrals on five continents. Maybe that’s what it takes. In a way, America is just like I was thirty years ago: the nice, progressive small-r religion just doesn’t have the power of traditional forms.

Still, I’m not giving up. It’s a very strange feeling to feel like I’ve solved the meaning crisis for myself, but that very few people are interested in my solutions. I love my religion with a lower case r, but will it ever scale to the point that it can challenge nihilism on the one hand, traditionalism on the other? I really don’t know.

Thanks for reading. Let me begin with an advertisement for the 2025 Adamah Meditation Retreat, which I’ll be co-leading next month in Connecticut. This six-day silent retreat combines insight meditation with non-traditional Jewish prayer and is a great example of the kind of contemplative small-r religious practice I love. (Non-Jews and Bagel Chasers are welcome.) If you use code JAY10, you’ll get 10% off the registration cost — which, incidentally, is only to cover room & board; the teaching itself is offered by donation.

Feel free to pass the discount code on to your friends and communities.

Meanwhile, some links:

• The good news continues this week: Here’s with the best summary I’ve seen of this week’s Epstein revelations, and the furious reactions they’ve caused on the Right. And here he is again with an analysis of the disastrous interview Trump did with Laura Ingraham, who usually fawns over him.

• I will probably be writing about this, but in the category of people I never thought I’d be recommending you read, here’s far-right conservative commentator Rod Dreher reporting on the pervasiveness of hard-core antisemitism among young MAGA apparatchiks in DC. This is required reading. Here’s on the same thing.

• Since I use Penn Station almost every week, it was extremely depressing to read this excellent NYTimes in-depth investigation into why it sucks and probably will continue to do so.

See you next week and thanks to all my subscribers for your support and recommendations!

It has also been a reminder, for me at least, of good old fashioned dharmic virtues like epistemic humility, impermanence, and equanimity.

True, among the hundreds (thousands?) of election takes written this week, I have not seen this particular angle developed. On the contrary, much of the media discourse — conservative, centrist, liberal, progressive — has continued on doing exactly what it had been doing, namely confirming priors, predicting doom (whether from Trump or Mamdani or whomever), and, in this case, pivoting seamlessly from chanting in unison that “Democrats are hopelessly lost” to chanting in unison “Democrats have found their mojo again.” The herd of sheep has simply changed directions.

So here’s an attempt at a different narrative, one which has the benefit of providing (at least to this writer) a useful course correction.

Really, this election result should not be surprising, because it tracks what polls have been telling us for months: that MAGA insanity is deeply unpopular not just with news junkies and leftists, but with, you know, ordinary centrist Americans who aren’t on board with liberal politics but are basically decent human beings focused on kitchen-table issues and not into things like the Gulf of America or the Billionaire Ballroom.

Republicans are all on the Trump train for a variety of reasons, not least fear of retribution from Trump’s friends in conservative media and billionaire-donor circles, and so everyone’s been kissing in the ring. But in so doing, they have managed to do a remarkable two-step dance of self-immolation: massively overreaching on their base’s pet issues, while completely failing to deliver on what voters most wanted the party to do: fix the economy.

The election results illustrate a core principle of electoral politics: that overreach is good for the other side. To reach for an ancient (2023) example, when Ron DeSantis starting banning books and making anti-wokeness the center of his politics, I cheered, because he was way to the right even of many Republicans. Conversely, when Black Lives Matter and MeToo took extreme positions in 2020 and 2021 (‘Abolish the Police’, white people are effectively born racist, there can be zero tolerance not only for sexual misconduct but for contested, debatable gray areas of male behavior), I was nervous. In the heat of it, as I was forced to attend several long DEI ‘trainings’ at my former place of employment, I knew that the backlash would come. And so it did.

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Today, of course it is not ‘good’ for ICE to be throwing legal residents of this country into unmarked vans; it is horrible. But it is politically good. Ditto a lot of Project 2025. A majority of Americans do not support this agenda, and it’s not why they voted Trump back into office. And ditto all of Trump’s blustering nonsense, which normal people, including many who voted for him, do not like. Oh, and don’t forget the Epstein Files, which as I’ve written about here before, may not be top of mind for progressives but is absolutely part of the picture here. Promising to unseal the names of powerful pedophiles, then backtracking because Trump is obviously one of them, is a bad look and it matters.

Probably, the GOP could get away with this overreach if they at least tried to bring down the cost of food, housing, and fuel. But they’re running in the opposite direction with dumb tariffs and trickle-down economics. Polling shows that to the extent normal people (i.e. not political junkies) are aware of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, they hate it. The summary assessment of it as “tax breaks for billionaires while taking away food stamps and health insurance” is sticking, it is accurate, and it is a loser for the Right.

On a personal/spiritual/psychological level, I need to relearn the value of political equanimity. Despite its connotations, equanimity — at least in the Buddhist sources that undergird my contemplative practice — doesn’t mean one doesn’t feel emotions like moral disgust, fear, and anger. It means that one can acknowledge them while retaining the ability to sit back and assume a posture of noticing, observing, and remembering rather than merely reacting. For example, Trump’s destruction of USAID is both a humanitarian catastrophe and a political miscalculation that will likely have “positive” political consequences. The National Guard on the streets of American cities is a blow against the democratic order and, most likely, an overreach that is not where American public opinion is.

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If you’ve been reading this newsletter, obviously you know that I’m not sanguine in the face of these depredations. Protest is important, trying to break through right-wing media walls is important, and voting is very important. Passion and equanimity are both of value. But if I reflect on my “bad days” from 2025, they are when the scale tipped too much toward doomsaying, certainty, and panic. This week’s news might, I hope, bring a reminder of the value of having both a cooler head and an impassioned heart.

In practice, this may look like oscillation between the two — I didn’t expect this essay on “oscillation as spiritual practice” to be my touchstone this year, but it has turned out to be that. That’s fine. We have moments of immersion and moments of constructive detachment. Or it might look like balance, complex seeing, and multivalence; holding multiple realities at the same moment. How does it look like for you?

When I look toward 2026 through these lenses of epistemic humility and complex seeing, I see three major questions.

The first is whether there will be fair elections next year. The issue with next year’s elections isn’t whether the Republicans are popular — they aren’t. It’s whether there will be fair elections at all. Trump’s inner circle have made no secret about their love of Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orban. Well, look at what happens in Hungary. There are elections but they are unwinnable by the opposition. Orban’s people control most of the media and the election apparatus itself. Opponents are depicted as anti-patriotic extremists and, if need be, arrested and silenced. It is very, very hard for opposition politicians to prevail.

Are we prepared for that reality here? I don’t know. And the more convincing the Democrats’ victories are, the more important the GOP’s anti-democratic initiatives become. I remain both worried and pessimistic about the fairness of the 2026 elections. Gerrymandering we know about – but what about ‘election integrity commissions’ who, if they follow Trump’s lead, may disqualify mail-in ballots en masse? What about ICE and the National Guard on the streets near polling places? What about endless lies and rage-bait on Newsmax, OAN, Fox News, The Daily Caller, and CBS News? What if Larry Ellison prevails in his bid to own CNN?

I don’t think we really know. We don’t know that it’s going to be Orban 2.0, we don’t know that it won’t be. This is where, I think, we ought to concentrate most of our attention: in ensuring that this tyranny has an expiration date.

Second, we don’t know which is the right recipe to defeat it at the polls. On the left side of the aisle, there are now two increasingly solidified theories of How To Win: win the center and motivate/enlarge the base. For the last ten years, the Democratic establishment has mostly tried the former. But this year, Zohran Mamdani did the latter and won, which is remarkable. It is indeed surreal that New York City will soon have a socialist mayor with a record of hard-left positions (especially on Israel/Palestine). But this is exactly what Bernie Sanders said could happen: rather than waffle and cozy up to the establishment, candidates should focus on core economic issues, motivate the base, and enlarge that base by attracting anti-establishment independent voters, who are numerous.

I’d love to see the centrists/abundance types have a little more epistemic humility when it comes to Mamdani’s successful application of the Sanders playbook, but many threw their own “vote blue no matter who” slogan out the window when they didn’t like who the who was. Of course, New York City is not Virginia (or even New Jersey), and what works in a liberal blue city may not work in a moderate purple state. So it would be nice to see some humility on the left, too. Basically, I don’t know who is right in this debate, but I think those same virtues — equanimity, analysis, the right kind of detachment — could be really helpful right now.

Finally, the wild card in all this is the Supreme Court, which finally, after the most dispiriting nine months in its recent history, seems ready to limit Trump’s power to unilaterally declare tariffs, which is clearly a congressional rather than presidential power. At oral arguments this week, Justice Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts seemed highly skeptical of what Gorsuch called a “one-way ratchet” increasing presidential power in this way.

Once again, wisdom calls for multivalence. On the one hand, the Court’s “shadow docket” rulings have caused enormous suffering and damage to our constitutional order. On the other hand, Justice Barrett was correct when she said, on Fox News, that these are all interim orders. Maybe, maybe, the Court will side against Trump on some of his most consequential power grabs after all, particularly those justified by bogus “emergencies” that have functioned as an end run around the separation of powers. (They will still destroy the Voting Rights Act and any semblance of respect for transgender people, however.)

Preaching to myself here, and you if you’re reading these words, I want to make a plea for longer-term, less reactive political discourse. Obviously, it’s hard to resist the Roy Cohn/Steve Bannon tactic of flooding the zone with shit every five minutes. There are outrages everywhere. But this week’s election result could inspire us to keep focus on longer term trends and threats, rather than the outrage of the day (or hour). This is a dark and uncertain time, but it is not a story whose end has been written. Many catastrophes that people predict do not in fact come to pass — often because of the hard work we do to prevent them.

Effective, sustainable political engagement requires spiritual practice. Dr. King knew this, Gandhi knew this, and plenty of figures on the Right knew it too, even if they deployed religion in ways I profoundly disagree with. Like everyone I agree with politically, I’m enjoying the post-election glow. We all deserve it. I’m also harvesting some lessons I’m grateful to relearn.

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Thank you for reading and for subscribing. It’s nice to have some good news to write about.

Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week:

• ’s summary of Trump’s “emergencies” gambit is really useful reading. It’s one of those pieces to bookmark and refer to later. (I’m still curious who in the administration came up with this tactic).

• My understanding of Trumpian overreach was inspired by ’s analysis of Project 2025 and how it has been rolled out more quickly than planned, with adverse political consequences.

• has written a nonfiction Thomas Pynchon novel about an absurd psychedelic shyster named, Pynchonesequely, Virgil Klunder. I can’t do this piece justice; you’ll just have to read it.

• I’ve read so much verbal garbage about antisemitism, Israel/Palestine, and Judaism lately, I’m sick of the entire subject. However, there has been some very, very good stuff on the subject lately as well: ’s survey of philosophical analyses of the phenomenon; at Arc magazine, ’s enquiry into what is meant by ‘love of Israel’; and ’s look at American right-wing antisemitism, which has boiled over in the last week, entitled ‘A Viper in its Bosom.’

Again, thank you for subscribing — I hope you’ll consider spreading the word. I’m happy to say that this project is now financially sustainable and we’ve been rolling out more subscriber-only benefits as a result. Thank you! Keep the faith.

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It’s hard to choose a single affective quality that defines America right now, but I think the defining one is anger. The Trump regime’s rage, and that of its core constituency and propagandists, is well-documented. To choose but the most recent example, which I saw this morning, consider when an American government communique has spoken like this:

But my focus this week is not on their rage, but on ours. On mine.

I’ve struggled with anger for my entire life. I grew up in a safe and supportive home, but both my parents had violent tempers. There was occasional physical violence, and very frequent verbal violence: shouting, insults, threats. It wasn’t until my twenties that I realized this was not a universal experience. Together with self-judgment and shame, anger is the quality of mind I’ve worked with the most in meditation, therapy, and other modalities. In a way, having a husband and child has helped in this work, since it’s made it more urgent, more necessary.

There are, of course, many kinds of anger, many experiences of it, many ways in which it can help or harm. Some anger is merely irritation or impatience, but the rage I feel in response to that illegal, inaccurate, and hateful USDA notice may be different. Perhaps it is “righteous indignation.” Perhaps it motivates me to take action, donate money, write articles, and vote for candidates who might reduce the amount of hate in our politics, rather than increase it.

But even in the latter case, I often experience anger as corrosive. It is exhausting, it makes me miserable, and it bleeds over from politics into the rest of my life. A year ago, as the 2024 election results came in, one of the predominant emotions I experienced was dread — not only of what Trump would do, but of this weight I remember carrying around during his first term, which is now omnipresent. The “background hum of dread” I once called it.

Probably the best way to deal with anger is to do something — to take action. And I hope you are doing things that are impactful, even if you’re just impacting your family or neighbors; that’s a great place to start. But here, I want to focus on how I’ve been dealing with anger internally, in my own body and mind. Since lately, I’m experiencin a hell of a lot of it.

2.

In some of the contemplative traditions that I love, the best thing to do with anger is extinguish it. In Theravadan Buddhist dharma, anger is dosa, one of the three poisons that are the root of all negative states, and so you want to recognize it, recognize its causes, and learn the ways to prevent it from arising in the future. (Satipatthana Sutta 4.1) This doesn’t mean repressing anger; if it’s present, it’s present. But it does mean avoiding the conditions that give rise to anger, and cultivating qualities that help it dissipate more quickly, such as lovingkindness.

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This does work, in my experience. It can be as simple as changing the mental channel for a moment, and that goes internally as well as externally. There is a gradient between staying informed as a responsible citizen and being unhealthily obsessed with rage-inducing news, and mindful attention to where I am on that gradient at a particular moment is extremely helpful.

But there are other ways to work with anger that I like even more.

One is to attend closely to what is really going on when anger arises. Lama Rod Owens, a (self-identified) queer, Black Buddhist teacher, has written what, for me, is the definitive dharma book on anger, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. One of his central insights is that anger contains information: it shows us where our love is, where our grief is, where our values are. “Anger is confessing that it’s not the main event,” he writes.

This investigation is similar to something the late Joanna Macy developed in her ‘work that reconnects.’ Beneath the despair and rage we may experience about ecological devastation is a profound love for the world that can be nourishing and reconnecting. After all, if we didn’t care, we wouldn’t ache. In this way, our anger and pain can bring us closer to what we believe to be true and important. It is the opposite of spiritual bypass; it is spiritual attention. And when I shift, however subtly, from the rage to what is motivating it, the content of my thoughts shifts from what I hate to what and who I love.

A second way I sometimes work with anger is to situate myself that space between stimulus and response. (Viktor Frankl did not actually say “Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response.” But Lou Reed did say “Between thought and expression, there lies a lifetime.” That is good enough for me.) Some Buddhists love micro-analyzing this space — the ‘wheel of dependent origination’ divides it into a dozen components — and there is a value to doing so. The conditions for anger are present, and anger arises (or sometimes doesn’t). This is not to be repressed; it’s just cause and effect. But the next moment sometimes offers a choice: whether to respond, how to respond, what to do. And here, there is indeed a pseudo-Franklian moment of freedom. It’s not repressing anger to choose not to express it in an unhelpful way. I can stand there feeling the anger, allowing it, not judging it — but not speaking, or writing, or banging something. That, I count as a “win”: the negative space of not acting unskillfully.

What ‘skillful’ means in a given interaction is, itself, a reflection that will be different for each of us. Rereading Lama Rod’s book recently, I was struck by his statement that as a large-bodied Black man, he had learned that expressing his anger in public can be dangerous, since it might be perceived in our racist culture as a threat. Reading that, I contrasted Owens’s experience with the legacy of queer rage that I inherited from ACT-UP, in which expressing rage was ennobling: it showed we weren’t weak, we were strong, we were standing up for our community. Because of the different prejudices the dominant culture has against these two groups, the valence and value of expressing anger are completely different. Who is allowed to express anger, and who is not? When is a woman judged for seeming angry, while a man is praised for it? While anger, itself, may be a universal emotion, the expression of it is conditioned by social structures that affect us in different ways.

Finally, the space between thought and expression points, for better or for worse, to the truth of impermanence. I would say that around 99% of the expressions of anger that I later regret were made in the moment of being angry. Had I waited a few minutes, even a few seconds, the anger would have subsided and I could have made a tactical choice of how best to communicate. Again, sometimes the best choice is to communicate. The right kind of expression can be politically valuable. The wrong kind of silence can be relationally toxic. The point isn’t about one choice being right; it’s about having agency to make a choice.

3.

Despite all I’ve just said, I’ve often wondered about the people (including our president) who seem to thrive on anger. There are moments when I feel this way too, particularly if no one else is around so there aren’t any external consequences. Usually, I find the somatic experience of anger to be quite unpleasant, and I hate the fruits of regret, but in the moment, there can be an energy to anger that feels vital, even invigorating.

And while it’s common in therapeutic or spiritual circles to hear people say that these people must be in deep pain all the time, I don’t know if that’s true. Some of them claim to be pretty happy, even if others (like our dear defense secretary) have a series of broken relationships and addictions that suggest they are not. I did do two minutes of exhaustive research on this subject, and found one study showing that anger helped people solve puzzles, win prizes (often by cheating), and do well at some video games. It also does seem to help someone become the world’s first trillionaire. Are all these very successful people actually miserable? I have no idea. Sounds like sour grapes to me.

I can only say that this is not the kind of person I want to be. I have seen the destructive power of anger in family relationships and in myself, and I don’t want that. I see the ugly face of weaponized anger every time I check the news. I am, as I’ve written here before, caught in a thirty-year-long oscillation in which I am drawn to and then repulsed by political engagement and journalism. And some anger is clearly the price of admission to that world.

I want to close with a meditation practice and a provocative quotation, not coincidentally both drawn from queer Black teachers who have had plenty of reasons for rage, and plenty of experience with its costs.

First is one final teaching from Lama Rod Owens: a six-step mindfulness practice for when anger arises. It has the absurd acronym SNOELL, which stands for See, Name, Own, Experience, Let it go, and Let it float.

The first step is seeing what is going on: noticing that you’re activated, often with the body as the primary clue. Heartrate elevated? Tensed muscles? Something is happening, so Name it. If this is rage, name it as rage. And Own it: this is taking place, it’s not getting repressed, it’s here, it’s what’s real, and it’s in me. It’s not someone else’s fault, even if someone else’s words or actions caused it to arise. It’s not my fault either; it’s just my material to work with, not theirs. This is an important transition from the stimulus to the present-moment experience. We’re not focused on what was said or done anymore; now we’re focused on the experience of anger itself. So Experience it — again, not repressing or exacerbating it, but just allowing the mental and physical experiences to unfold. It could be a pleasant rush of energy or an unpleasant marination in dreck. But it’s just a temporary experience to have.

Finally, those last two steps. The first is short-term: let it go. This may last only for an instant, but for that instant, perhaps with an exhale, you can let go of the anger. If it comes back a second later, fine. Still you’ve let go of it for that moment, and who knows, sometimes more than a moment. ‘Let it Float’ is a bit longer-term. Maybe after letting go of the anger, it’s still right here. Okay, so just let it float there. Here’s the anger. In the extremely annoying cliché, it is what it is. You don’t have to do anything about it.

I find this six-step practice with the silly acronym to be quite useful – give it a try if you like, and please buy Love and Rage to learn much more.

Finally, some closing words from Audre Lorde, which I’ll leave for you to ponder on your own:

Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy.

Thank you for reading and subscribing.

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It feels good to take a break from writing about enraging things, to write about rage itself. I’m working on a semi-long-form analysis of Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist for Arc Magazine, and will hopefully be able to share that soon. I’ve also continued to put videos online from last year’s symposium on psychedelics, law and religion, including these cool ones last week:

Thanks for reading and for being a paid subscriber. Please spread the word so that this work can continue to grow, and please take care of yourselves out there.

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What is the meaning of repentance, if everything is God?

On the purely cognitive level, the answer is not complicated. All of us live within the delusions of the ego, the yetzer hara, which sees the world not as it is — as manifestations of a single Being, according to the Hasidic nondual reading of the Shema — but as divided into many different, separate objects. Most importantly, the ego sees itself as separate from the rest of the world, and evaluates the world according to how well what’s outside is pleasing what’s inside. It’s as simple as “have a nice day” — “nice” being a term that means “pleasing to the self.” This is our ordinary existence, conditioned by eons of evolution and natural selection, and without this ordinary frame of reference, we’d all be dead. Pure nonduality doesn’t do well at crosswalks.

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Ours is a very peculiar slide into authoritarianism.

On the one hand, the current regime’s offenses against humanity, democracy, and civilized society itself are grievous, real, and set to worsen. To take but one example of hundreds, as you read these words, at least 56,000 people are in ICE detention, the vast majority of whom have either no criminal convictions (30%) or only minor criminal offenses like speeding tickets or, in one case, fishing without a license (40%). And ICE’s budget is set to grow over 300% next year.

On the other hand, perhaps a majority of Americans are doing just fine — for now, anyway. Life goes on more or less as normal. The ICE raids aren’t targeting me, right? I’m not in danger of losing Medicaid. True, the impacts aren’t zero: in my case, close colleagues at Emory and Harvard have lost funding, and I’ve been caught up in that too. I’ve also had some invitations rescinded by cowardly organizations. But that’s hardly the acute suffering others are experiencing. If I tune out the news, I can ignore what’s happening. Most of my anxiety is optional.

This is extremely weird.

Obviously, it’s also extremely (1) privileged/lucky/self-centered and (2) temporary. It’s morally repugnant to only care about one’s own well-being when others are suffering to such an extent. It’s also imprudent: I’m one antisemitic or homophobic incident away from tragedy, and one weather pattern away from being like my friends in L.A. or Asheville. And who knows, maybe the government will start coming for queer liberal rabbis who write anti-Trump Substacks. Stuff can get real very, very quickly. As bad as things are right now, this may be the calm before the storm.

But at this exact moment, I’m guessing at least half of America is in a similar position to mine. We can tune out the horrors if we want to. Do we want to? How ought we balance self-care and civic responsibility (or self-interested prudence)? Too much news consumption, we go mad; too little, we are complicit. So how much news is too much news, and how much is too little?

2.

While I do have some answers to that question, I’m most interested in how we answer it, which in my case has more to do with subjective emotional intuitions than objective moral reasoning.

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On the More News side, I think it’s gross to be so self-centered and devoid of empathy as to simply “tune out” the suffering of others, particularly those who are marginalized, demonized, or invisibilized by the dominant groups in our society. Whether it impacts me directly or not is secondary; the point, as pretty much every religion on the planet teaches, is to care about other people.

On the Less News side, however, I also know from experience that too much marinating in the soup of the polycrisis renders me less able, not more able, to help. More is not more, and increasing my misery is not helping anyone. There have been days in the past few weeks when I’ve felt despair, when I’ve regretted my decision to bring a child into this century. On those days, wisdom has looked like unplugging from the internet.

Both of these impulses — toward the news and away from it — are felt senses, not reasoned conclusions. Yes, there are articulable reasons why democratic societies need an informed, engaged citizenry. And I believe that to be true. But if I look inward, I see that my motivations are more emotive. I feel itchy if I’m not aware of what’s going on in the world, and gross, to repeat that word, if I’m knowingly turning away from injustice. And I feel overwhelmed and despondent if I'm doomscrolling too much. All of these are embodied emotions, not cognitive principles.

Again,I know full well that what the Stephen Millers of the world want is for us to turn away. Here’s a great interview excerpt with Sandor Lederer, founder of K-Monitor, a pro-democracy NGO based in Hungary:

@msnbcWATCH: Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has transformed his country into electoral autocracy using tactics that bear a striking resemblance to those currently playing out in Trump’s America. In this episode of "Trumpland with Alex Wagner," Wagner travels to Hungary and speaks with lawyers, journalists, politicians, and advocates on the ground who offer important lessons for the U.S. #hungary #donaldtrump #victororban #politics #news

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As Lederer notes, there are great restaurants and cultural events in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. If you don’t pay too much attention to politics, you can lead a pretty good life. Which is exactly what the authoritarians want you to do.

I agree with that analysis, but my real response to the dynamic it described is based on emotion. Fuck those bastards, I say to myself. I’m not going to do what they want. I have no moral high ground here; these things just piss me off. And I know people who are just as pissed off by the latest pop culture drama of who dissed who, or the latest sports news, or the injustice of a wrong vote on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Obviously, while I’m not here to judge anyone’s choices about where to devote their attention, I do think there’s more at stake in the fate of American democracy than in these other topics. But I can see the other side, too. Politics is always a mess, after all, and has been for millennia. Is staying informed a matter of wisdom, or folly? Maybe following the “affairs of kings and princes,” as the Buddha disparagingly put it, is a waste of time that would be better spent on spiritual practice, art practice, relationships, food, or (not according to the Buddha) culture. Maybe, instead of high-minded civic duty, I’m acting out of habit, outrage, offense, revulsion, and a little bit of hope and love.

Sure, moral reasoning and moral intuition are not wholly separate from one another. But if marinating in the news is just a matter of personal preference, then I should definitely do less of it, because it does often make me miserable, or at least recognize the mixture of motivations that exist in any particular moment. That’s the first step, anyway.

3.

The easiest news consumption to cut out is the part that’s due to habit. Probably a hundred times this week, I’ve noticed an itch to click on a news site out of boredom, or resistance to work, or avoidance. Those itches, I’m trying to leave unscratched. There are plenty of alternatives to the rage-inducing, time-wasting distractions of online news: getting up and stretching, reading a book, literally anything is better. Here, the delusion that “I must find out what is happening” is at its most transparent.

It’s also possible to triage one’s attention. As I wrote about a few months ago, “articulation helps.” The overwhelm is, itself, overwhelming; I’ve noticed an almost frantic drive to keep up with the insanity, which itself wastes time and energy. So it can be wise to choose two or three issues to focus on, and mostly ignore the rest. There are plenty to choose from: the war on liberal society (science, academia, the media, the legal establishment) on the part of post-liberals, theocrats, nationalists, and gravely mistaken futurists; the ICE gestapo that is arresting innocent people, jailing, torturing, and deporting them without due process, with children my daughter’s age being zip-tied on the street and forced to defend themselves in court; the sheer quantity of lies, conspiracy theorizing, and misinformation about everything from immigration (immigrants commit crimes at half the rate of citizens) to election results, crowd sizes to Covid; the horrors in Gaza and the insane ‘discourse’ around Israel, Israel/Palestine, and antisemitism; the Supreme Court; the sneaky attacks on voting rights, election security (the real kind), school funding, and other subjects that don’t make the news that much; the RFK sideshow, soon to kill hundreds of thousands of people by gutting research, inventing fake statistics, firing experts and replacing them with charlatans; climate suicide, with a side-dish of glee on the part of the bad guys; killing millions of people by pulling the plug on foreign aid and US health programs (including Medicaid); and all of it with a level of vulgarity, stupidity, meanness, and abject corruption never before seen in American government.

What is the point of that exercise? There are two of them. First, I always feel better when I write these lists, as if articulating and disaggregating the evil makes it somehow more finite. If I’ve tidied the mind, I feel better, and there’s less of a temptation to get updated all the time, which is literally crazy-making. And second, I can pick two or three issues to continue to follow, and leave the rest to other informed citizens.

Lastly, over the years, I’ve written several guides to sane news consumption with titles like “How to Survive the News” and even, back in November, “How to Survive the Next Week.” In fact, googling these pieces to get the link, I have just discovered that Google’s AI has conveniently summarized my advice:

That’s weird (there’s a longer version available too) though also not inaccurate. Paying attention to your mood, body, and mind is really helpful in deciding whether it’s really wise to click that link or post that comment. I do it sometimes, fail other times. Allowing the range of your emotions to exist without the need to repress or express them — also helpful. And Finding the Others — also good. Thanks, Google.

But I want to conclude with where I am right now, not where I was when I wrote those things a couple of years ago. And where I am is a lot darker.

4.

There is almost no good news right now, other than the possibility that this period of extremely bad news might somehow come to an end in sixteen months. Things are bad, they’re set to get much worse, and at least a third of the country loves it. While I appreciate the work of journalists emphasizing the positive developments that are taking place, that enterprise, for me, is a slippery slope toward toxic positivity. I would rather feel the shittiness.

At the same time, are things worse now than during the War of 1812, the Chmielnicki Massacres, or the Black Plague? Probably not. Are the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion any different now than in the period of warring states in which the Buddha lived, when sixteen Mahajanapadas were in near constant battle with one another? They are not. This is just how human beings are, and, like Frodo Baggins, we’re unlucky to be living through this period of regression and repression.

Pop culture associates religion, spiritual practice, and mindfulness with feeling good — with happiness in its ordinary meaning. But in fact, these practices are oriented around a very different kind of happiness, which often coexists with profound sadness, and which is primarily about a fundamental acceptance of the extreme shittiness intrinsic to the human condition. That is the “happiness that does not depend on conditions.” That, as Whitney Houston sang, it’s not right but it’s okay — or at least, I’m basically okay, even if things are dark.

What did you expect, human? You thought things were going to work out for the best? There’s plenty of goodness, joy, love, holiness, and delight in the world — but things are often quite horrible. This is how life is.

I’ve also taken comfort in the knowledge of un-knowledge. Maybe AI will kill us (or, if Elon Musk has his way, turn us into holocaust deniers), or maybe it will save us. Ditto with psychedelics. Maybe geoengineering will save us from climate disaster. Maybe this horrifying paroxysm of white Christian Nationalism, and the immense catastrophe it is soon to bring about, will be a cathartic last gasp of old ways of thinking and being. Maybe the dialectic is working itself out right now in some inscrutable way that will eventually come to some kind of synthesis.

Or maybe the world my daughter will live in will be an unremitting hellscape. I’m talking about radical epistemic humility here. The stakes are high, and so is the uncertainty.

Finally, I take a kind of comfort in knowing that how I act is more important than how I feel. It’s okay to feel like shit under these circumstances. More poetically, the wonderful teacher Joanna Macy, who incidentally has just entered hospice care, once said:

This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.

That is such a relief to remember. It’s okay to feel this pain. It’s only not okay to pour it out on other human beings. We only have to be kind, to ourselves and to others. When my despair spills out into bad partnering or bad parenting, it’s time to snap the hell out of it and remember that, whatever happens, the right thing to do is show up with love and presence and not be a dick. As Ram Dass said (in a passage frequently misquoted):

I’ve been asked many times whether this is the Aquarian age and it’s all just beginning, or if this is Armageddon and this is the end, and I have to admit I don’t know. The way I’ve usually copped out in dealing with it is saying, “Whichever way it goes, my work is the same. My work is to quiet my mind and open my heart and relieve suffering wherever I find it.” That seems to be what my life is about, and it doesn’t matter which it is — it’s the beginning of everything or the end of everything — regardless, that’s still what I gotta do.

In times like these, the point of life is not to be happy; it’s to be compassionate.

And from that standpoint, it’s easy to know when I’m consuming too much news. It’s when I’m being unkind to others. That’s a surprisingly simple answer, and in the face of so much cruelty and ignorance, it’s even a maxim of resistance.

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Two provocative pieces on petro-masculinity this week, one by entitled “Real Men Burn Stuff” and another by Annabelle Lukin. This is fascinating and one of the better explanations of our fossil-fuel-fueled mass suicide I know of.

If you’re ready for more horrible news, please read ‘s horrific summary of what inmates in the El Salvador concentration camp/death camp are experiencing right now. It may just be my moral intuition, but I think we all need to wake the hell up to what is going on.

Thank you sincerely for your support. I hope this week’s newsletter prompts a bit of reflection and sanity-making for you, as it did for me.

Here’s something I learned in junior high school: often, the dumb people are in charge, and no matter how transparently dumb they are, they have the power to make everything worse.

Does this sound familiar?

I wonder how much of my loathing of this authoritarian period in American history is based on those old, teenage memories. It would be bad enough if our leaders were merely malicious. But they are also so dumb. The ridiculous hair, the repulsive Oval Office decor, the transparently idiotic yes-men calling the Dear Leader “brilliant” all the time. The military parade. Trump Steaks, the Trump memecoin, now apparently even the Trump cellphone plan.

Much has been written about Trump’s dictator aesthetic — here’s one excellent piece in the New York Times on his “Gilded Rococo Nightmare” of an Oval Office. To me, the overarching feature is its stupidity. Obviously, bragging about being strong is a sign that one is weak. Gilding everything in cheap gold makes one look cheap, not wealthy. Ridiculous plastic surgery makes women look fake, not beautiful. And yet — a lot of people don’t get it. As Fran Lebowitz said in 2016, Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person. Anyone with taste knows that he’s pathetic. But most people don’t have taste. They see gold, they think rich.

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None of these details matter in comparison with snatching innocent people off the street and mocking the rule of law. But to me, maybe because of my memories from the bad old days, it heightens the insult. Like the Scots in Trainspotting complaining that they’d been conquered by a bunch of wankers, I feel put upon that my country’s cruel dictator is also so freaking dumb.

The worst people have all the power.

2.

The last two newsletters were about my recent injury and my recovery from it. As I thought about transitioning to the usual obsessions of Both/And — in particular, the spirituality of American politics — the connection became clear. More than once, I remember thinking, laying in my hospital bed, about so many people suffering similar pain but without all the good fortune I have. What happens if you break your pelvis in Gaza? Probably you die, or become permanently disabled, or at the very least suffer agonizing pain since there are no working hospitals to go to anymore. Or what about someone injured by a missile fired from Iran to Israel, or from Israel to Iran? Or the hundreds of thousands of people in Africa now going without medical care because Elon Musk believed some conspiracy theory about USAID.

I’m not a pacifist or an anarchist. I think wars can sometimes be just. And I don’t mean to sound cloying or self-righteous here. But surely we want as little misery as possible, right? Surely experiencing any pain should sensitize us more to the pain of others, right?

Well, sometimes. It’s also possible to have the opposite response.

Fred Trump, the president’s late father, was a cruel, racist man who taught his sons that there were two kinds of people in the world: winners (“killers”) or losers. At 13, Donald was sent to military school, where beatings and other violence was common. Donald was also haunted by the failure of his brother, Freddy, to live up to his father’s expectations; a longtime alcoholic, Freddy died in 1981 of a heart attack related to his addiction.

One path open to the young Trump would have been to reject his father’s ways and use his boyish experiences of suffering as the soil for his own compassion. Having known what it is like to be victimized unfairly, he might have empathized with all who are oppressed, marginalized, or victimized. (He might even, eventually, have learned to forgive his father, who doubtless had childhood traumas of his own.)

That, obviously, is not the path he took. Instead, Trump has spent his life trying to live up to his father’s expectations, learning from his mentor Roy Cohn how to be ruthless. Trump hates weakness of any kind. Compromise — even paying one’s bills — is for losers. And those on the short end of the societal stick — Muslims in term one, “illegals” and liberals in term two — deserve to be there. Donald treats immigrants the way his father treated him.

I was quite fortunate by comparison. While there was shouting and occasional shoving in the home I grew up in, there was also a lot of love, nurturing, and garden-variety American Jewish liberalism. My mother was a feminist and loathed what she called “the good ol’ boys club” — her term for the white, male, conservative, racist, and probably antisemitic Floridians who held power in Tampa in the 1980s. And while I rejected a lot of my parents’ world — a GenX kid, I was nauseated by the the patriotism, hypocrisy, prejudice, superficiality and materialism of the 1980s — my sense of outrage at cruelty only grew as time went on.

And I was on the wrong side of my high school’s social hierarchy — the stupid kids were in charge. I was awkward, nerdy, pre-gay, Jewish, and smart; even had I wanted to, I don’t think I could have fit in. Then again, Stephen Miller was a lot like that too, and look what happened to him.

Could I have gone the other way? Could I have have chosen toughness? I have no idea. Certainly I’m no paragon of compassion. I have friends who are full-time activists, vegans, and just really kind people who take care of people. But I make compromises. Could something have happened to have made me conservative instead of progressive? Maybe, like Winston Churchill never actually said, getting mugged? Seeing how life is cruel and strength is the only way to survive?

It seems like a mystery, and yet it’s such an important mystery; it determines our history. What makes someone more liberal or more conservative? What combination of nature and nurture, experience and reflection, leads one toward compassion or cruelty? What causes us to harden our hearts to those unlike ourselves, or to soften them and recognize our shared humanity?

I have absolutely no idea.

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3.

There are, of course, many smart conservatives, fascists, theocrats, libertarians, post-liberals, and whatever Peter Thiel is. Obviously, liberal policies are not the only ones that are based in compassion. There are also times when causing suffering is justified in order to prevent more suffering. Again, I’m not a pacifist.

But surely there is something uniquely evil about the way the present regime, and its propaganda networks, take so much pleasure in the suffering of those they deem (carelessly and without due process) to be enemies of the people, whether those Others are migrants or federal workers or scientists or reporters or anyone else. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, to empathize with their fears, to seek common ground, but I just can’t do it. It’s one thing to solemnly, seriously take actions that cause death or despair. It’s quite another to enjoy it.

Maybe there’s a connection between fascists’ cruelty and their inability to comprehend depth, complexity, irony, or self-reflection. While Lao Tze and Obi-Wan say that true strength lies within, fascists think strength lies with strength. More gold, rich. Bigger guns, strong. Bad or foreign people, bad. Again, I don’t think conservatives think this way. But fascists do — at least, fascist leaders and followers. The bureaucrats, the Stephen Millers of history, know what they are doing.

Ultimately, my recovery from this injury has, I’m afraid, mostly confirmed my priors: suffering is bad, empathy is good, gratitude and meditation are also good. But even this brief encounter with the fragility of the human condition has made me wonder anew how so many people can become inured to it. I don’t have any foundation for this view. Maybe pop-culture Nietzsche, Andrew Tate, and Curtis Yarvin are right. Maybe the heart is better when it’s closed off, so you can make strong decisions for the common good and break as many eggs necessary to make the omelet. I just cannot imagine living that way.

Thanks to everyone for your well-wishes over these past few weeks. It has been a journey, but I’m now walking without a cane and the pain is very manageable. Once again, I feel very lucky.

There’s obviously a lot going on right now in the news: Iran, the NYC mayoral election (which I wrote about here), and much else. Let’s not forget the daily trespasses against democracy and human dignity being meted out by ICE, the shredding of environmental regulations and protections for our planet, the inhumanity of DOGE (which still exists), and the classically authoritarian war on higher education, the free press (the actual one, not the Substack propped up by dark money which the publisher refuses to disclose), and the legal profession.

If I could pop out one story that deserves more attention, it is the nomination of the extremist Emil Bove to be a federal judge. has been all over this story — here’s his latest and here’s a comprehensive take on why he is totally unfit to be a judge. If I were to choose one under-discussed story to pay attention to, this would be it.

There’s obviously a lot happening in the news right now, but a lot of my attention is turned inward as I recover from the injury I described in last week’s newsletter. So I’m going to stay on that theme this week as well. -jm

For many years, as I practiced and taught meditation, I’ve wondered about how well it would work under extreme circumstances, like the ones I’ve been in for the last ten days. Had I banked enough hours on the cushion for the skills to be there when they really mattered? Or would the stress just be too much for them?

I’m happy to say that I passed the audition. The basic skills of mindfulness meditation, and some of the core teachings of the Dharma, have come through in the clutch. I’d like to share some of what worked, less as a survival guide and more as inspiration if you’ve been meditating, or trying to meditate, for some time. tl;dr — in my experience, those hours are worth it.

Mindful Breathing. The skill of using the breath to center oneself quite well-known —my seven-year-old daughter has already learned it in school. But it was still a (figurative) life-saver for me, including when I twice experienced severe hypotension, which is when the blood pressure suddenly crashes (in my case, to under 80/40). I have to say, it’s an interesting experience when you see the facial expressions of medical professionals suddenly get very serious and concerned. Was I just about to faint, or was I about to check out of this plane of existence? I’ll never know. But as I settled in on the breath, as I’ve done thousands of times before, it felt like coming home. I felt present and even at peace, not because things were okay (they were not) but because this is my home, this mindful attention to the body and the breath. Ultimately, I remember thinking, I have no control over what happens to me, but I can do my part, which is calmly, mindfully breathing as normally as possible. And if the worst were to happen, I remembered Joseph Goldstein’s aspiration that his last breath be a mindful breath. (“In, out, in, out, dead,” were his exact words on a retreat I sat in 2004.) What else was mine to control?

Moving Really Slowly. Everyone recovering from an injury knows that you have to move carefully and slowly, especially at first. And while meditation is not a prerequisite for doing so, I have found it helpful over the last week when I slowly rise up and get down and slowly put one foot in front of the other with my walker. (It also helps that if I move the wrong way, I am ‘punished’ with shooting pains in my midsection; I am, as finance bros would put it, highly incentivized.) Lifting one leg up, slowly putting it down — I did this for hours on in end walking meditation, and now I do it getting in and out of bed. The movements feel familiar, even relaxing. Again, I feel like I’ve practiced for this and have been here before.

Nothing to Do. A few days ago, I joked to my daughter that what I’m supposed to do for the next few weeks is this . . . and then I just sat there. And sure enough, I’m not working or moving or doing that much. I am banking a lot of meditation time; sometimes mindfulness meditation, sometimes ‘resting in awareness’, sometimes just noticing the sounds and sights of my home. Along with the combination of disorientation and gratitude that I’m feeling, there’s a strong sense of what some teachers call ‘enoughness’: that this moment, even if it is objectively dull or even painful, can feel like enough. Here you are, reading these words, breathing, alive. Of course, the world is not in a great place, and maybe you aren’t either – but there can be a temporary feeling of enoughness, in which there’s nothing to do, nothing that has to be better than it is. That feeling passes, of course, but when I’m feeling it, it’s delightful. And I do have a lot of down time.

Noticing Thoughts. That said, my brain still has a lot it would like to discuss. I’ve watched a parade of thoughts and feelings these last several days: despair, contentment, anxiety, assigning blame, gratitude, disappointment. I will be fine, I will never be like I was. How could this have happened, things like this happen all the time. A couple hundred times, I’ve done the cognitive two-step of (1) allowing these thoughts to happen (not repressing or banishing them) and yet also (2) not believing them or taking them too seriously. What do I really know? I’m not a doctor or a scientist, and nothing is certain anyway. Emotionally, I’ve had good days and bad days, and I’ve kind of let the days happen. They pass. Everything passes. As Todd Schulman put it, thoughts appear and disappear like little farts.

The Dharma. The source of mindfulness is Buddhism — more specifically, a modernized version of one strand of Buddhist teaching. Mindfulness meditation can be just a technique, and as such, it works well in secular as well as non-Buddhist spiritual contexts. Yet over the twentyish years I’ve been practicing meditation, I’ve found that it is greatly enriched by the deeper wisdom teachings which brought it into being 2,500 years ago. Ditto over the last two weeks. During one particularly acute period of pain, it was so helpful to just see what was happening simply as dukkha, as suffering, which is an unavoidable part of human existence. Dukkha is a feature of life, not a bug. It’s just part of what it is to be human, subject to human nature, and maybe a good use of our time on the planet would be to lessen the amount of it worldwide. (Conservatives may disagree.) It was also helpful to see these periods as anatta, as not ‘me’ or ‘mine.’ The causes for this injury were present, the injury happened, and now here are the effects. Again, it’s not that something bad happened to me. Things like this happen. One night, you’re dancing at a party on Fire Island, and the next night, you’re in the ER. Things are impermanent. This no-bullshit, stoic-like wisdom has been a huge support to me.

The Sacred. And yet, I’m not only a mindfulness practitioner. I am also an aspirational mystic who loves the sense of the sacred. And so for the last two weeks, I have loved cultivating moments of ordinary mysticism: sitting in the sun, listening to music, reciting the Jewish Asher Yatzar blessing after going to the bathroom (which I obviously do not take for granted at the moment), listening to Ram Dass’s “I Am Loving Awareness” talk. This sense is often a quiet sacrality, not the fireworks of a psychedelic experience. But of all the consolations, this one might be the best.

Comfortable with Failure. Finally, I’ve found it really helpful to be comfortable with failure, when everything I’ve said so far doesn’t work. I admit, I hesitated to even write this essay because I didn’t want to sound cheerful, pollyannish, or like I have everything under control. That is definitely not the case. Sometimes I feel really shitty. But fuck “success.” Screw Here Are Eight Tips To Feel Better Even When You Break Your Pelvis. To hell with the lies of the wellness industry, whose purveyors are always sweeping the dust under the rug. The dust is part of life too, isn’t it? ‘Failure’ is totally fine. It’s not like wishing it away is going to work anyway. Obviously where ‘failure’ impacts other people, that’s a different story – but if it’s just falling short of some ideal, then bring it on.

So, there are seven ways in which meditation, mindfulness, and something approaching mysticism have contributed to this journey of recovery. I hope some of them resonate with you, both as inspiration for the possibilities of meditation, and more immediately, since we’re all a little (or a lot) traumatized right now, with wars and authoritarianism and eco-anxiety and the destruction of American culture and leadership. You don’t have to break your pelvis to feel this way. Although I guess it helps.

It has been, as put it in his excellent “Let’s Put All This Into Perspective” piece, a complicated week in America. Please share some of your favorite takes in the comments. As for myself, I have a dozen ideas to develop, but this week I’m happy just to make it to the refrigerator without pain. Thank you to all my subscribers for your support; that really matters now, and I’m committed to continuing to publish this weekly newsletter. The tide is worsening, but it is also turning. The data shows it and I think we can feel it. Now is the time to stay engaged.

I guess what happened was a ‘freak accident,’ although it was actually quite banal. My family and I were at a vacation rental that came with a pool and hot tub. The pool, though, wasn’t done — contractors being contractors. So, instead, there was a huge pit, lined with wood, the edge of which was only two feet from the hot tub. Saturday night, after a long day of rain, I was opening the lid of the hot tub when I took a step and there was nothing beneath me. I fell into the hole.

Or rather, it now appears, three feet to the little ledge in the photo, and then the rest. This detail might have changed my life.

I have a fractured pelvis. Google this: “Open Book Pelvic Fracture.” I didn’t know about it either. But a few inches either way, and I might have suffered a spinal cord injury and been paralyzed. I’ve wiggled my toes for doctors several dozen times by now. This was luck.

Had I hit my head, I might have died. I was outside alone, my partner and friend inside the house. They didn’t see what happened and didn’t hear me when I screamed for help. I somehow crawled up the pool stairs, across the deck, and into the house. But had I not been able to do any of those things, I would likely not be here right now, on the sofa in my home, released from the hospital, writing this post.

Thank you, nature and/or deity, for the shock response and adrenaline.

I was taken to the hospital. Everyone was great: the EMTs, the nurses, the doctors. We initially thought it was a hip injury, since that’s where the 10-out-of-10 pain was, but eventually the doctors figured it out and I had surgery. I now have titanium bolts in my pelvis, which must count for something. (Yes, I will be able to go through airport security — bizarrely this is everyone’s first question, including mine.)

While in the hospital, though, my blood pressure crashed two times, both without warning. I turned grey (so I’m told), got extremely hot, and I felt like I was going to pass out. The nurses and doctors looked seriously concerned. I don’t want to exaggerate anything; I don’t know if I was close to death or just close to fainting. In retrospect, the doctors think that those were sudden periods of internal bleeding and that they were serious. I got a transfusion and haven’t had an episode since. So who knows?

It's now Wednesday, three and half days after the accident. I’ve made a great recovery. I was released from the hospital yesterday, I am walking with a walker, and apart from some seriously unpleasant side-effects of the fall and the surgery, I’m basically “fine.”

Overwhelmingly, the feeling is that I got very lucky. I feel gratitude, but to whom or to what? I feel disoriented that it all could have been very, very different.

* * *

I don’t ascribe meaning or intentionality to events like this. I don’t know if that’s a matter of education, belief, or just temperament — I think the latter. Maybe it’s the shadow of the Holocaust, or just everyday theodicy, but it isn’t a matter of philosophy. It just isn’t how I see the world, or how I feel it to be. Did I get lucky or unlucky? If the Universe (let alone “God”) saved my life, didn’t the Universe also get me in this mess to begin with? None of these kinds of explanations make any sense to me. They seem ridiculous.

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I have many friends who believe in the ‘Law of Attraction’ in various forms, and some friends who are traditionally religious. I respect their ways of interpreting events, but this kind of thinking is a foreign language to me. It seems completely implausible, and unhelpful, like it’s missing the real point. Which is simply that things happen. Life is uncertain. We are delicate creatures.

This is where I find comfort, although it’s precisely a kind of non-comfort. The truth is a kind of release. This is how life is.

I do feel more alive now than a week ago. I didn’t learn anything new on a cognitive, intellectual level. Life is uncertain, and the most important things are beyond our control. And because of that, it’s better to be compassionate, alive, and open. No profound Chödronisms here. But I’ve certainly been reminded of the truth of these very simple statements, and with them comes a sense of vitality, even wonder.

Most of my writing, whether on spiritual or political topics, is the result of reflection and revision. I’m still in this, though. These are thoughts in mid-flight, or mid-fall, or whatever. And I’m quite aware that I haven’t shared any startling insights here. As I’ve said before in my writing, most of the life-changing insights I’ve gotten over the years can fit on bumper stickers. It’s how you know them that matters.

* * *

There is a strange, background calm. I feel I’m living on borrowed time. Sometimes I feel like I did die, and that this is a simulation or alternate reality: Jacob’s Ladder but with laundry and lunchboxes. Fortunately, I’m not at all dissociative and so I don’t take that feeling seriously. Life is plenty real for my partner and family, as is the shock that mine could have just ended, or at least been radically transformed.

The calm is also sometimes disorientation. I’ve reviewed the picture of the pool pit several times. I don’t remember hitting that ‘shelf’ halfway down, but I must have. So maybe I didn’t “almost die,” though that fall is still surely enough for a spinal cord injury, and I did fracture my sacrum as well as my pelvis. It’s as if the amount of the gratitude I should feel depends on the architecture of what might have been.

“Hedonic Adaptation” is once again the salvation and the adversary. We get used to anything. People can be happy in refugee camps, and miserable in mansions. We reestablish our emotional baselines very quickly, and reset to wanting more good stuff and less bad stuff. This is why rich people aren’t happier than the rest of us, and why I can start complaining again, four days after the accident. Already, I have to remember to become grateful to be alive.

But for now, there is still a peacefulness here. Since my main job is now healing the body, sitting around doing nothing is actually being on-task. Like some older people you see at nursing homes or hospitals, I’m content to stare at the wall and rest. Not for long, I’m sure, but I’m enjoying it for now. Hedonic adaptation hasn’t taken over. I can notice every sandwich, feel good about being able to stand up. And I can appreciate how vital I was, obliviously, until this happened. I was quite lucky even before I didn’t injure my spine.

Maybe my standard for profundity is too high. Maybe these scribbled insights are enough. But everything I feel right now seems obvious. And it seems equally obvious to ask why I didn’t feel this way before.

Thank you for reading. A few other notes.

First, unfortunately, due to my injury, I’m unable to make it to Psychedelic Science next week, which is a major professional bummer. My presentations and panels have been assigned to other folks.

Second, I’m very aware that this may be one of the most impactful authoritarian weeks we’ve experienced this year. Fortunately many others have been reporting well on it, and I have little to add since my attention is elsewhere. If nothing else, perhaps this post can serve as a distraction from that news. I hope you’ll consider turning out on June 14 for a ‘No Kings’ protest near you. The lies, conspiracy theories, incitement, and of course the outrageously norm-breaking sending in of the military — all of it is a moment of acute crisis. I just felt I had to say that.

Here are a few political links I wanted to add:

Chris Murphy on Trump’s threat to use violence against peaceful protesters this weekend:

A reminder of this simple fact:

A headline I’d like to see:

And here’s my friend on the front page of the Daily News. Very proud to be friends with Don - subscribe to his newsletter!

Follow me on Instagram if you like these things. Regards from the couch.

Share Both/And with Jay Michaelson

My father died when I was 26. Somehow, I hadn’t expected it, even though he had spent most of the past two years in and out of the hospital, fighting smoking-related ailments, and even though he had been steadily been getting worse in “rehab” for several weeks. I remember how my mother had typed out a list of questions for our doctor onto a 5x7 piece of paper, and how we sat waiting in his office (over air-conditioned, like every indoor space in Tampa, where I’d grown up) when we got the news. “I’m sorry,” the doctor said, before we could even say hello, “but he passed just a few minutes ago.”

I don’t know why I didn’t expect it, but somehow this came as a shock. Death hadn’t seemed to be on the menu. No one talked about the obvious-to-everyone-else fact that my dad might die, and maybe I was too young to understand the reality. How could this happen? This wasn’t what I’d been told to expect.

I felt similarly in March, 2020. To be sure, I’d grown a lot over the 23 years between my father’s death and the onset of the pandemic. I’d lost my mother, survived a serious car accident, come out of the closet, and spent ten years making up for lost time. I co-founded a magazine, sang in a rock band, wrote books, started a dot-com and two nonprofits, and had a great gay decade. I also spent a lot of time on meditation retreats, in therapy, and in intimate friendships that I’d never been capable of before.

And yet, despite all of that, I recall that same cratering in the abdomen, that same panic in the chest; that same cognitive dissonance. This wasn’t what I’d been told to expect.

And I sometimes feel it now, too, in this age of poly-crisis, meta-crisis, and national spiritual crisis. I never expected to see resurgent nationalism in America and around the world, and no one foresaw the massive changes looming because of technology and AI. And of course the spiraling climate crisis (which so many deny is even happening), the obscene imbalance of wealth and resources in our society, the death of truth, the abject cruelty that at least a third of Americans celebrate — and let’s not forget the extremism, conspiracy thinking, furious rhetoric, and misinformation that infects all parts of our public discourse, regardless of political valence.

Should I put on my meditation voice now? Should I reassure you that, if you take some deep breaths, everything will be okay?

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I don’t think it will be. As I’ve written in these pages, I cycle through rage, sadness — but also resilience, even a kind of contentment. I think this is how it is supposed to be, honestly, in times like ours. Toxic positivity is bullshit. Wellness culture is garbage. It would be inhuman not to be heartbroken. I don’t feel confident in my country’s future, or even the future of the planet, and increasingly feel personally insecure living in it. What some Americans are willing to celebrate is deeply disturbing.

So if ‘everything’ will not be okay, the attention shifts to ways in which people, especially vulnerable people, can be somewhat okay, or at least suffer less. And of course there are ways that I’ve found, and taught, to find happiness in the midst of all this chaos, without sacrificing the engagement and involvement in public life that I think this moment demands of us. There are ways through which authentic, durable, actual happiness can be cultivated, even when things are not okay: even when the heart is broken, when the mind is anxious, and even when the world seems to be falling apart.

And yet, I sometimes feel that, as soon as I talk about resilience, mindfulness, psychedelics, happiness, or balance, I sound like a privileged, narcissistic twit. Who the hell cares about the happiness of people like me when the fire is raging?

That’s a fair question to ask, but it’s not really how human beings work. We all do what positive psychologists call “hedonic adaptation,” that is, adapting our baseline emotional states to our contexts. This is how some ultra-rich people can still be miserable, and some prisoners can still be happy. I admit, I have had trouble dancing and celebrating the way I did before November, 2024, but I’ve done a little of it lately, and it’s been okay.

Anyway, am I more effective at making the world less cruel when I, myself, am miserable? It’s an overused quote, but the queer Black feminist activist and poet Audre Lorde was surely right that, for her anyway, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Obviously, that was more true for someone whose very existence was questioned and subjugated by the state. And it can be deployed as rationale by far more comfortable people. So maybe it’s just a matter of balance. Of Both/And.

2.

A lot of our happiness really is up to us, as the Stoics, Buddhists, and many others have insisted, and yet the kind of happiness they speak of — “the happiness that does not depend upon conditions” in one allegedly Buddhist formulation — is not about feeling happy all the time. In in fact, it’s often the opposite: it comes from accepting things as they are, even as we also work to change them (Both/And again). In the words of Thai Buddhist master Ajahn Sumedho that I’ve referred to before in these pages, “Right now, it’s like this.”

That doesn’t mean things are great, or good, or okay, or that they all happen for a reason, or that you can just manifest a better reality. Maybe things are terrible and won’t get better. “Right now, it’s like this” is merely declining to deny what is true. It’s like this: the sounds, the sights, the emotions. In the great fake-Zen-koan cliché, it is what it is.

Simple, but complicated — and also contrary to how most of our machineries of happiness operate. Mostly, it’s imagined, happiness comes from getting what you want, i.e., by changing the conditions: switch the channel, buy the car, win the game, come out on top. And yet, asks the Talmud: Eizehu ashir? Hasameach b’chelko – who is rich? The one who is happy with their share.

This kind of happiness is not an ever-present dwelling in joy and lightness, like some great Hollywood Ending in the sky. It’s the ability to return the mind, heart, and body to a state of equanimity and equilibrium, to a basic sense of okay-ness that simply arises from a quieter mind, resting in its own awareness. Thus you can be happy and still kvetch, you can be happy and sad, you can be happy and engaged in the messy world of politics and strife, you can be ‘happy’ at the bedside of a friend who is dying. By training the brain to rest, even alongside anxiety, stress, rage, self-judgment, and other “uninvited houseguests of the mind,” it’s possible to coexist even with the gigantic catastrophe unfolding around us in the world right now.

3.

That, for me, includes a comfort with discomfort itself: an accommodation of the uncanny, even the obscene. Suffering is random and uncertainty is everywhere. Most things are determined by luck. Human beings love, and make art, and discover amazing things, and we are also ruled by our instincts and appetites. We delude ourselves easily; we cause dissention, suffering, and destruction. And we also make great pastries.

Maybe homo sapiens really is not up to the challenge, as I’ve also written about here. Maybe our primal instincts to value the in-group over the out-group, power over compassion, are too strong. Maybe we are just too stupid, too susceptible to whatever unconscionably idiotic idea props up our preexisting conceptions of how the world ought to be. I still think that the best hope for the balance of the biosphere is to upgrade the minds of as many human beings as possible — whether by spiritual practice, mystical practice, meditation, psychedelics, whatever — to strengthen their prefrontal cortexes and help them shine light on the places of inner darkness. But I don’t know if that’s enough. The most reactionary aspects of human nature are remarkably resilient. Even when cities are flooded, climate deniers remain unconvinced, or unmotivated, or focused on their paychecks. Traditional religion is a resilient thing. Post-liberal theocrats are in such profound denial of their own insecurities, they don’t see them as insecurities. Perhaps our species is simply not up to the challenge of its own success.

This, too, is part of the discomfort I am growing comfortable with.

I want to return to that feeling of surprise — that sense that “this isn’t supposed to be happening” — with which I began this post. I think that’s a good sense. In a way, it’s the opposite of hedonic adaptation; it’s shock. And that’s a sign that the abnormal has not yet been normalized. We have not adapted to kids being picked up on the street and thrown in ICE detention centers, or to hostages being tortured, or to two million people being ethnically cleansed from where they live, or to higher education being systematically dismantled by boors and theocrats, or to the Measles being a threat again, or to a $400 million plane being given to the president as a bribe, or to the seething rage of America’s populist right. We still think “it isn’t supposed to be like this.”

Both are true: “right now, it’s like this” and “it isn’t supposed to be like this.” Both that our zeitgeist is reflective of fundamental qualities of the human mind, and that it should occasion a queasy sense of discomfort. And even if it’s not ultimately true, even if it steals my sleep and darkens my days, I think it’s good to feel that things shouldn’t be the way they are.

How are you doing?

I find myself in constant oscillation. Sometimes, I feel anxious about the fragile American experiment in democracy, enraged that so many people are already living in abject terror right now, and equally enraged at the hundred million or so Americans who think things are going great.

Then again, it’s a lovely spring day, I’ve had a full day—preparing a talk on gender in the Talmud, finishing the final for my psychedelics class at Harvard, taking my daughter bike-riding—and it’s possible, for people with my good fortune, to still live pretty normally. Is this obscene, or human, or both?

I find myself oscillating between these realities, as if living in two worlds. For now, the horrors are mostly somewhere else—even though I teach at Harvard, after all, whose battle for survival has already affected me and many of my colleagues. For privileged people like me, the worst can still be turned off. The two worlds exist simultaneously, and I shuttle between them depending on where I place my attention.

And then there are times when the oscillation itself is disorienting.

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2.

I experience this oscillation in a second way: pendulating between what Jewish mystical practice sometimes calls the “human point of view” and “God’s point of view.”

The human point of view is temporal, sequential, and linear. It’s 9pm, later it will be 10pm, and in the morning it will be tomorrow. I am a person with a history and with a Default Mode Network full of identities. I am worried, grateful, safe, in danger. The rule of law matters. My bank balance matters. My family and loved ones matter.

From what the Jewish mystics call “God’s point of view,” however, all of those things are empty (ayin). Says Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, there is no difference between the world before creation and the world after creation. Think about that for a moment. Everything is empty, everything is God, nothing else is real.

That’s the theological version anyway. In practice, this oscillation has more of an emotional, embodied tone than an intellectual one. Something approximating “God’s point of view” can be cultivated in spiritual practice: meditation, prayer, psychedelics, and cultivating flow states in any number of ways. A few days ago, for example, I was listening to a musical setting of the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra, the Jewel in the Lotus. A lot of my consciousness sunk into the timeless, already-awakened consciousness (or at least a chill vibe) and all of the vicissitudes of ordinary life, from torture in El Salvador to traffic on the Garden State, were just waves on the ocean.

And then I could snap right back into the horror.

And then rest back into the nature of mind.

Hinei El Yeshuati, Eftach v’Lo Efchad, wrote Isaiah: Here, God is my salvation, I will trust and not fear. Let’s say that ‘God’ here denotes that expanded consciousness, in which all impermanent things (i.e. nearly all things) are hevel, vanity and emptiness. If I can say Hinei – Here – this consciousness saves me from fear.

I don’t have trust in outcomes. I know enough history to know that things often turn out very badly. But I have trust in this presence, in this present-moment awareness. It feels atemporal. It seems unknowable. I can rest in it.

And it is half of the story. The other half, of course, is the gigantic pile of shit that 2025 has become, thanks to the rage of the mob and the duplicity of its enablers. That is where the work is.

In some philosophies of mysticism, the human point of view is illusion, and the divine point of view is enlightenment. But in most Kabbalistic and Hasidic presentations, this is not so. In fact, both points of view are true. They are, in one metaphor, the upward-pointing and downward-pointing triangles that make up the Star of David. After all, only in the world of finitude and boundary do the commandments of the Torah have any meaning. In transcendent peak experiences of oneness, nowness, and immanence, such distinctions are effaced. Those moments are profound and life-shaping, but they are only half of the Plan. Moses doesn’t stay up on the mountain, bathing in the radiant beauty of the Divine presence. He comes down and sets up a court system, because the rule of law is sacred.

So it’s Both/And, of course.

3.

These are nested oscillations. Back and forth, from spirituality to justice, from distraction to dread, from emptiness to form, from a long term unknowing to an immediate knowing, from beauty to brokenness, from turning toward God to turning toward human beings. Ratzo v’Shov, in the Jewish metaphor: running and returning.

For the last several months, this oscillation has been my primary spiritual path.

I am, due to both luck/privilege and twenty five years of developing these contemplative skills, able to step back from the excruciating vulgarity and rage of contemporary politics. I remember, as Hakeem Jeffries said, that leaders come and go but God “sits on the throne.” Everything passes. Everything happens not for some discernible reason but because of countless causes and conditions. I have no idea where any of it leads. Doing so feels like self-care, which Audre Lorde memorably described as political act. It’s even, if you’ll pardon the mystical pun, Self-care.

And then — back into the fray, whether I like it or not. I’d like to say that this oscillation back to political engagement is part of some righteous moral calling to avoid spiritual narcissism and work to alleviate the suffering of others. But to be honest, it’s just how I’m wired, I think. I know people who can ignore the news for days or weeks at a time, and I am just not one of these people. I get itchy knowing that bad things are happening, and that maybe I can help in some small way, and so I turn toward them.

Sometimes, the oscillation turns into simultaneity. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I experience something like what Bertolt Brecht called “complex seeing,” attentive both to the intimate tragedy of suffering and the complex systems — economic, political, psychological, spiritual — that bring it about. Somehow I hold my rage and my equanimity. All of this is all too real, and also, somehow at the same time, evanescent.

And then I get lost again.

For further reading:

• Paul Krugman, The Third-Worlding of America

• Ezra Klein, The Emergency is Here

Not about the catastrophe:

• Jules Evans, Skinwalker Ranch and the rise of UFO political religion

• I’ll be speaking on Gendering the Eunuch: Talmudic Discourse and Trans/Queer Temporalities at Harvard Law School, April 22

• And I’ll be speaking on Psychedelics, Sufism, and Kabbalah: Mystical Techniques, Spiritual Paths at University of Wisconsin, April 24

Thanks for your support, everyone. If you’re celebrating Passover or Easter this week, many blessings to you. If not, I wish you blessings too, but only if you want them.

You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.

There’s a lot in this teaching. It’s sustained me over the past few weeks, especially in the hard times. And so I’d like to share it with you, though since this post will be a little more personal than some others, I’m going to restrict it to paid subscribers.

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Whatever it was, that’s what we did, and by all accounts, the results were extremely positive.

I am deeply grateful to my colleagues at Harvard for their work, support, input, and wisdom, and to everyone who showed up. Which is a lot of people: we had around 30 presenters, and over 700 attendees joining us in person and online. has already provided an excellent writeup of the symposium on his Substack newsletter, , but as a co-convenor (with Professor Noah Feldman) of the symposium, I wanted to offer a few notes here from my own perspective.

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First, here’s a bit about what we set out to accomplish.

The symposium was called Psychedelics and Monotheistic Religions: Sacramental Practice and Legal Recognition, and responded to the dramatic increase, in recent years, of psychedelic use in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. While indigenous people have been using these compounds for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and while people of all backgrounds have been exploring them for a century, it is a new phenomenon that thousands of people experience and understand their psychedelic use as part of their religious practice or identity.

And yet, all of this sincere religious practice is, technically, against the law. There is, as yet, no legal recognition of such use, which remains formally illegal under the Controlled Substances Act. Arguably, this religious use is exempt from the CSA, based on several court precedents and settlements with other psychedelic religious organizations, but there is no case that has yet tested that, and no guidance from the government. Meanwhile, the legal doctrines that govern this question are significantly limited in nature.

Against this background, the symposium set out to explore (1) the historical and theological bases for psychedelic use in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, (2) the self-understandings of contemporary psychedelic practitioners in these traditions, and (3) the match/mismatch between them and the the requirements for a religious exemption to the CSA under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

First, scholars and theologians discussed traditional models for such practice. All scholars who presented were skeptical of the speculative claims for Biblical and other ancient Mediterranean psychedelic use, noting a paucity of evidence and significant leaps of logic between the available shreds of evidence and conclusions based upon them. I’ve written about some of these claims here, and Harvard Divinity School’s Charles Stang has written perhaps the definitive analysis of them here.

It was interesting to see how the fifty-or-so psychedelic practitioners in the room received these critiques. After all, many of them see themselves as reviving ancient practices that underlie religions around the world — some psychedelic communities have even included works like Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods in their scriptures. And, well, the air did seem a little tense at times. On paper, it made perfect sense to bring practitioners, scholars, and lawyers together, but in practice, it was simultaneously the least-academic academic conference some people had ever attended, and the most-academic conference that others had ever attended. The weirdness was fascinating.

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Yet, as Christian Greer, Sharday Mosurinjohn, Charles Stang, and I all proposed at the symposium, insisting on ancient roots of a contemporary practice is a curiously fundamentalistic move. In context, it may be understood, Greer proposed, as a response to the “Pharmacological Calvinism” of religious conservatives opposed to psychedelics: the view that revelation is a matter purely of Divine Grace, that there is nothing we can do to effectuate it, that drugs are evil and hallucinations are delusory. In opposition to this view (which, upon inspection, is intensely Eurocentric and oppressive), what Greer calls the “Entheogenic View” is a maximalist assertion that, in fact, mind-altering substances are the hidden source of Biblical and Mediterranean religions, not only Meso-American ones.

For Greer, this is simply the inverse of the hostile view: both insist that only what’s ancient is legitimate, that religious cultures cannot evolve new rituals and methods of Divine communion that are as authentic as older ones. Though this flies in the face of religious history itself (in just the Jewish example, prayer replaced sacrifices as the predominant form of worship), it does resonate with the felt sense, in psychedelic experiences, that these experiences are foundational, ancient, and true. I resonate with that felt sense, but for Lockean reasons, I also am leery of making unverifiable subjective religious experiences the basis for ontological claims, let alone political ones. After all, it’s likely that a majority of such experiences are hostile to my very existence.

There is a third way, which Greer called the “Empirical View.” Intoxicating compounds are, in many religious traditions, used as a means to attain revelation, healing, power, and magic — and all such traditions come with guardrails, warnings, and prerequisites for safe use that are of enormous value to practitioners today. But not in all traditions, until recently anyway. In some, including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ones, other techniques are used to cultivate Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs), including fasting, trance techniques, magical processes, contemplation, and prayer. Rather than insist on what Mosurinjohn called a “Western civilizational pedigree” for the use of psychedelic compounds specifically, perhaps it would be wiser to investigate the pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods for cultivating ASCs more generally, explore the reasons such states are religiously valuable, and develop a syncretic, non-colonial approach to incorporating new technologies learned from non-Western cultures.

Several scholars in the symposium explored how this might look.

In the first session, scholars identified a large number of models, methods, and purposes for the cultivation of ASCs in classical Jewish sources, ranging from the ecstatic rites of women ritual leaders in the Bible to magical and theurgical operations in Kabbalah and Hasidism. Muslim scholars talked about Sufi mysticism (including the possible use of hashish), the contemplation of Ibn ‘Arabi, and the contemporary embrace of psychedelics in Muslim communities which experience elevated rates of mental health crises (including suicidal ideation). And in the Christian context, Rev. Jaime Clark-Soles noted that Christianity is founded on ASCs — visions of the resurrected Christ, Paul on the road to Damascus, the Book of Revelation — and has an array of methods of how to cultivate them, including ascetic practices, sleeping in holy places, ecstatic practice, and, perhaps, the Mysterion itself.

Psychedelic practitioners offered a wide range of self-understandings of their religious psychedelic practice. While some saw themselves as reviving ancient traditions of psychedelic use, most emphasized that their psychedelic use was motivated by present-day spiritual and psychological factors, including healing ancestral trauma, experiencing love in relationship to one another and to God, seeking a mystical experience with the Divine — even, in Jessica Felix-Romero’s phrasing, enabling God to connect with us.

Meanwhile, there were important criticisms of all this work. Ron Cole-Turner noted how love (and enduring bonds of love, rather than brief experiences of it) is absent from many analyses of psychedelic experience yet central to Christian mysticism. Ayize Jama-Everett highlighted the racialized ways in which some religious traditions are foregrounded and others marginalized, and proposed that the underground may actually be a safer and more equitable way to encounter psychedelics than some partially-legalized, partially-medicalized ‘above ground’ pathway. Laura Appleman gave a hilarious, terrifying presentation on psychedelics and eugenics that I’ll have much more to say about in a future newsletter.

And several participants sounded cautionary notes about the intense hostility that some religious conservatives have not merely to “drugs” specifically, but to any non-canonical way of accessing emotional, affective spiritual experience. Many believe it to be (like liberalism, of course) an act of the devil.

Finally, legal scholars noted the strengths and weaknesses of a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim case for an exemption to the Controlled Substances Act. On the one hand, courts recognize these traditions as, obviously, religions, unlike some claims of novel psychedelic spiritual communities. These practitioners are sincere, and not motivated by financial gain. On the other hand, existing jurisprudential categories such as ‘sacrament’ may not apply to the compounds used by religious psychonauts, and while some potential claimants may understand psychedelic use as central to their religious practice, it cannot be claimed that it is central to these religions as such.

And of course, there are significant cultural and ideological barriers in play. The DEA has never, not once, issued a religious exemption without being forced by a court, despite setting up a process to supposedly do so. And it is unclear whether the expansion of religious liberty jurisprudence under the Roberts Court would be applied to religiously liberal claimants as to religiously conservative ones. As I wrote about in ARC magazine two weeks ago, the Court will soon have the opportunity to apply that jurisprudence to liberal churches seeking to shelter undocumented immigrants — we’ll see if that happens.

Despite these challenges, it is still possible to conceive of legal doctrine catching up with this remarkable religious reality, and I look forward to digging deeper into this question in the months and years to come. For now, I will close with a personal reflection on what it felt like to dream in this way in the context of our shared national nightmare.

First, as was discussed at the symposium, many psychonauts don’t see the Trump regime as a nightmare at all: they are excited about the possibilities of innovation less fettered by small-minded regulations and restrictions, and hold views which Appleman aptly described as psychedelic eugenicist. (I’ll talk more about this in a future newsletter, too). Psychedelics are, as Stanislav Grof put it, a “non-specific amplifier,” and they do not generate a particular political point of view. Psychedelic messianism is undercut by psychedelic realism.

At the same time, the increasingly non-partisan nature of psychedelics offers at least some space for common ground, at least between the libertarian wing of the Trump regime, the civil-liberties wing of the opposition, and the diagonalist-whatever wing of conspirituality and horseshoe politics. I have no illusions that this one issue will generate a new era of non-partisanship. But it’s interesting to see it as, perhaps, one site for it. Elevating the experiences of people in ‘traditional’ religious contexts from a wide range of political, religious, and social locations, might also usefully complicate the Drug-War-era assumptions about the kinds of people who ‘do’ psychedelics, and spiritual practice in general. This, too, seems like a good thing.

Second, whatever future (or lack thereof) awaits our nation and our species, it is my experience that psychedelics, in both therapeutic and spiritual contexts (and in the many that blend the two), offer ways to relate to both beauty and terror that can be profoundly empowering and healing. I do not believe, as many of my fellow ‘spiritual teachers’ do, that our role as pastors is to help the human race navigate civilizational hospice. But we might be headed to, at the very least, a civilizational ER. Certainly, the exponential growth in AI threatens how people understand ourselves and our value in the world. The Trump regime’s suicidal climate denial will accelerate chaos and, according to mainstream scientific data, cause millions of deaths in the not-too-distant future. And so on, and so on, and so on.

In that context, perhaps psychedelics, like other remedies for the crisis of meaning, will play a small role in human beings’ evolution into less selfish, cruel, and ethnocentric creatures; certainly, between Trump, Vance, and Musk, the ethnocentric instincts in the human mind are predominant at present, and one might see the mainstreaming of psychedelics as one form of resistance to them. Working in the psychedelics space often feels like a civilizational Hail-Mary pass, and, to mix sports metaphors, I think it’s worth taking that shot.

But even if psychedelics have no impact on increasing human empathy, they still may have an impact on human resilience, wonder, consciousness, and perspective – all of which have their own value and merit. There are ways of being that lie beyond the fences, malls, fears, panderings, and algorithmic enragements of our now-dominant culture. And, to paraphrase an overquoted Rumi poem, I’ll meet you there. For ‘when the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.’

Here’s some great stuff I’ve read on this platform this week:

• offered a great read of UFC as the ‘beating heart of Trumpism.’

• offered typically granular data on how unpopular Trump is.

• continues to talk about terrible things no one else is talking about, including one of the most loathsome characters in Trumpland I’ve ever encountered, which is saying a lot.

• took a deep, dark dive into Peter Thiel. Must read, if you can stomach it.

• And has been indefatigably tracking Trump’s authoritarian attacks on the rule of law.

The conversation between Jews and psychedelics is thriving.

In the last half century, American Jews have been all over psychedelic spirituality, culture, and medicine, from Allen Ginsberg and Richard Alpert/Ram Dass to Julie Holland and Rick Doblin, Leo Zeff to Ethan Nadelmann, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi to Baruch Thaler z”l, Jefferson Airplane (3/5 Jewish!) to Phish, The Fugs to Seth Rogen.

More recently, with the advent of the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’ there has been an effulgence of Jewish psychedelic thinking — here’s a great conversation between Madison Margolin and Natalie Lyla Ginsberg, for example, and here’s one between Professors Melila Hellner-Eshed, Sam Shonkoff, and me — and lots of Jewish psychedelic doing, which for obvious reasons I’ll leave unspecified. There are, to my knowledge, psychedelic circles among secular Jews, Hasidic Jews, anti-Zionists, right-wing Zionists, Jewish Renewal types, OTD people, hipsters, professors, rabbis, artists, environmental activists. There’s a Jewish psychedelic organization, Shefa, which in addition to integration circles of all kinds is co-running a large-scale study of Jewish attitudes toward psychedelics being done by Emory University, where I am affiliated, and a class series starting next month called ‘Judaism is Psychedelic.’ It’s a busy time.

“What’s with all the Jews trying to legalize marijuana?” asked Richard Nixon in 1971, continuing, “It’s because they’re all psychiatrists.”

I’ll just leave that here as a koan.

One question that often gets asked is how long this “conversation” has been going on. There are some who believe that the answer is, well, millennia. They cite provocative passages in the Bible, Talmud, and Jewish mystical texts. They talk about etymology and chemistry. They point to archeological evidence of cannabis residue and (just revealed) Syrian Rue in Egyptian fertility ritual implements.

I am, as yet, unpersuaded by these claims. But I think it’s still possible, and useful, to look to the Jewish past for precedent, inspiration, guidance, and meaning for the Jewish psychedelic present and future. I think Jewish psychedelic use is, to quote Leonard Cohen, a new skin for the old ceremony.

2. Ancient Ayahuascas

I am sympathetic to the effort to find evidence for psychedelic use in the Jewish past. If one has some emotional or spiritual tie to Judaism, it’s natural to ask how this powerful spiritual experience does or does not fit into being Jewish. Are these experiences similar to the peak spiritual experiences described in sacred text? Orthogonal to them? Or perhaps misdirected, evil, wrong, avodah zara, or otherwise treyf?

Moreover, if one has psychedelic experience, then when one looks at visionary mystics in the Bible – Ezekiel, Daniel, Elisha, Isaiah – as well as in the Talmud, Kabbalah, Midrash, and Jewish magical and folkloric texts, it’s just natural to ask if these experiences have been occasioned by the use of psychedelic plants. Phenomenologically, the similarity is obvious.

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There are now several articles (and two books) alleging that Jews/Israelites in the time of the Hebrew Bible used psychedelic substances. (There are even more on the New Testament, the Eleusinian mysteries — which, incidentally, is the one argument I do find persuasive — as well as Zoroastrianism, and other ancient traditions.) These include two books by Dan Merkur, The Mystery of Manna (it’s ergot) and The Psychedelic Sacrament; Benny Shanon’s “Biblical entheogens: A speculative hypothesis” (DMT); a really helpful compendium of theories with glosses by Danny Nemu called “Getting High with the Most High: Entheogens in the Old Testament” and an unusual book by psychedelic pioneer Rick Strassman called DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, which proposes that while exogenous psychedelic were not used by Biblical Israelites, much Biblical prophecy might be explained by spontaneous (or divinely-inspired) releases of endogamous DMT in the brain.

Needless to say, I’m not going to review every claim in every one of these sources. But I think it’s worth starting with the negative evidence that few of these authors even mention: there is no mention, or even a hint, of psychoactive sacraments being used in the Biblical period. The sources marshaled by Merkur, Shanon, Nemu, and others are, at best, circumstantial and elliptical. If there had been a psychedelic or shamanic culture in the Ancient Near East, why is it not mentioned anywhere? If these traditions were suppressed, you’d expect them to be banned, like cultic worship of Asherah, sacred prostitution, and other ‘foreign’ worship — or explicitly restricted, if they were only for the elites. But, while there are ample Biblical references to a variety of permitted and forbidden spiritual and even ecstatic practices, there’s no mention of the use of psychoactive substances at all.

Turning to the positive evidence, the claims in these articles and volumes are all extremely speculative. Consider Merkur’s claim about the manna being psychoactive. Biblical texts suggest that the manna was consumed every day. Is this consistent with a shamanic or prophetic use of a psychoactive compound? Daily use? And is it not odd that the theophany at Sinai, the most important visionary experience in Jewish history, took place before this alleged psychedelic ergot was consumed by the Israelites in the desert? Anyway, the majority of Biblical scholars and archeologists doubt that the Exodus ever took place, certainly not as described by the syncretic and self-contradictory texts that were only codified hundreds of years after these alleged events took place. And what about the magical/supernatural properties of manna as described in the Torah, e.g. that it decays every day but not on Shabbat? There’s no textual evidence that manna was meant to refer to a psychoactive substance, rather than a myth about Divine providence and sustenance in the middle of a hostile desert.

Or consider Shanon’s provocative thesis that Biblical Israelites may have blended acacia bark (which contains DMT) with Syrian rue, aka peganum harmala (which contains the MAOI harmaline), to make an ayahuasca-like potion. Yet there is no evidence that these substances were combined, that acacia was used as a sacrament (it was used extensively in sacred architecture, but that is different), or that peganum harmala was even known to Biblical Israelites (it’s never mentioned in the Bible). True, Syrian rue has been widely used in the region for millennia, and, as I alluded to above, has recently been discovered in items used in fertility rites. But it appears to have been used not a psychoactive agent but a medicinal herb.

Nemu makes a somewhat more persuasive case for the incense in the Temple as possessing psychoactive compounds, including possibly cannabis, and there, at least, there is some juxtaposition of the potential psychedelic substance with actual visionary experience, such as the visions of Ezekiel the priest or the early strata of the Hechalot literature centuries later. But even these are, at best, speculations with no direct evidence. The dots are there but the connections are not.

To be honest, I don’t love these last few hundred words of debunking and negativity. Again, I definitely resonate with the desire to find ancient antecedents for a spiritual practice that is so important to so many people today, and in the next section I will attempt to provide some. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, and respect anyone who does find these ancient antecedents inspiring. Anyway, the large majority of religious claims are also probably not historically true, but I don’t go around dumping on them.

I also resonate with the felt sense, in some psychedelic experiences, that this is something ancient and powerful that may indeed underlie the world’s spiritual traditions. There does feel like these practices are core to the human experience generally, and the Jewish experience in particular. Incidentally, that is also true with the Syrian Rue-Acacia brew that some (okay, I) have nicknamed Oyahuasca (“Chaiahuasca” is another version) and which may provide, if not an ancient Jewish medicine, then one which is in a new-old Jewish tradition of sacred plants.

But, look, I’m trained in the academic study of religion, and I question things even when maybe I shouldn’t. I wonder if these efforts to find an ancient usable past are about justifying psychedelic use (a quasi-fundamentalism, really) or about justifying Judaism or the Bible for one reason or another. I wonder if those are desires worth looking at and gently questioning.

In the end, I’m open to being persuaded. I’m an agnostic on this question, not a disbeliever. But not a believer either. I do, however, have an alternative.

3. Grammar, not Vocabulary

While I don’t see evidence for ancient psychedelic use in the Biblical or Talmudic period, I do see evidence for a very similar pattern of spiritual practice.

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In other writing on this subject, I’ve described this pattern using the analogy of grammar and vocabulary. We don’t have proof of an ancient psychedelic “vocabulary” – i.e. compounds used to create altered states of mind. But there is abundant proof of an ancient psychedelic grammar of prophetic/ revelatory/ visionary/ spiritual experience: do a mind-altering practice, have some visionary experience, and gain prophecy, healing, or wisdom as a result.

There is tons of that.

Fasting is the most common such practice (see Exodus 34:28, I Samuel 28:20, Daniel 10:2, Judges 20;26, Joel 1:14, Zohar 1:4a-b), and has been used for generations to augment prayer or orient the mind to contemplation; this is true even today. There are references to shamanic and magical practices throughout the Bible, such as the woman of En-Dor raising King Saul from the dead; we don’t know what techniques she used, but that certainly qualifies as a non-ordinary experience that leads to a kind of revelation. While he was alive, Saul was described as being “among the prophets” and engaging in ecstatic dance and, perhaps, speaking in tongues. There are references to (forbidden) sexual cultic ritual, witchcraft, magic, and religious rites. There is the account, which I’ve taught as a kind of manual of meditation, of Elijah’s visions and hearing of the Divine in a “thin, quivering voice.” (‘Still, small voice’ is perhaps a more poetic phrase.)

And in more recent (but still centuries-old) contexts, trance techniques are frequently employed to cultivate non-ordinary minddstates, as discussed in Jonathan Garb’ Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah and Moshe Idel’s work on Abraham Abulafia. Kabbalists cultivated ecstasy in collective textual improvisation, lay on graves to commune with the souls of the departed, spoke with spirit guides (maggidim), engaged in ecstatic unitive prayer, contemplated the heavenly palaces, visualized the chariot of the divine — there is no end to their visionary practices, and throughout, the grammar is consistent: the mind is altered using a practice that enables non-ordinary perception, and some kind of prophecy or revelation is obtained. Sometimes that revelation is simply istkeit, as Huxley wrote: the doors of perception must be cleansed for the isness of reality to be seen. And sometimes these mystics encounter other layers of reality, other entities, even the personified Divine. There is no one mystical or psychedelic or spiritual experience. But there is a basic grammar that unites them.

This vast collection of visionary and mystical phenomena, not whether someone drank or smoked something, comprises the Jewish lineage which contemporary psychonauts have inherited.

Notice too that it’s the fruits of the experience, not the experience, that are centered in these accounts. Yes, Jewish prophetic experiences, like psychedelic ones, frequently include powerful visions: Israelites on Mount Sinai seeing the “feet” of Yahweh; Ezekiel seeing the Divine Chariot and the bizarre creatures who drive (or constitute) it; Abraham Abulafia’s trance communications with Metatron and very familiar-seeming somatic experiences; Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai or the Ba’al Shem Tov ascending to heaven to meet the Messiah. But in all these (and many more) cases, the bells and whistles of the visionary experience are secondary to the prophecies and insights that it yields.

Consider, once more, the revelation at Sinai. What Moses saw is only barely described in the text, but the minutiae of the Ten Commandments and ensuing tort law is exquisitely detailed. To take another example, Kabbalists and Hasidim meet the Messiah not to bathe in his glory but to ask him when he is coming to alleviate suffering on earth, and to see what they can do to expedite it. Abulafia’s ecstasy was not an end in itself, but a means to attuning to prophecy. Even Ezekiel’s revelation, which is more detailed than others, exists as a prelude to the several chapters of prophecy that follow.

So too, I think, with “prophetic” experiences occasioned by psychedelics. Sure, the fractal imagery of some medicines, the impossibly complex visual experiences of others, and the felt sense of being in the presence of other entities are all remarkable – the latter significantly shook my cosmological/theological suppositions when I first experienced it in 2007. But the fireworks display is of far less enduring value than whatever healing, insight, or communication might take place in such contexts. After all, the experience fades, but the integration of insights that come from it has lasting impacts.

This is also true for what I think is the most common non-recreational form of psychedelic use among Jews, which is less about revelation than healing. As I’ve written about in the last two weeks, psychedelics complicate the distinction between healing and spirituality. In many indigenous cultures that include psychedelics within them, the distinction itself makes no sense. But what I mean here is the use of psychedelics as, paraphrasing a term once applied to Rabbi Isaac Luria, “physicians of the soul.”

Psychedelics tend to bring up one’s “stuff” – trauma, neurotic psychological patterns, ways in which we’re cruel to ourselves and others, family relationships, challenges around sexuality and gender, you name it. And Jews – we have a lot of stuff. Whether you believe ancestral trauma is passed on purely psychologically or whether it is inherited genetically, Jews have a lot of it: centuries of vulnerability and persecution, the Holocaust, Israel/Palestine, contemporary antisemitism. This isn’t the sum total of the Jewish experience, thank heavens, but it is a big part of it, and it often shows up in weird ways: difficulty forming relationships, paranoia, aggressive communication styles, excessive fear and reactivity, distorted ways of seeing oneself (and one’s nation-state), and many others. Nu, what do you expect?

Psychedelics—like therapy, meditation, and many other modalities—can, if used carefully and responsibly, surface traumatic material in ways that are deeply healing. I’ve seen it happen, often with astonishing rapidity and durability. But because of this power, and because of the suggestibility that psychedelics create, a great deal depends upon the ethical commitments of the facilitator. In my twenties, I “surfaced” plenty of difficult stuff without adequate (or any) support, and even “recovered” memories that weren’t actually real. Nor are all pathways of healing equally beneficial; psychedelics’ capacity for suggestibility can also reinforce reactive senses of fragility or peril, leading to an intensification of harmful psychological patterns like nationalism or ethnocentrism or psychedelic messianism. It’s not simple.

My sense of the Jewish sacredness of psychedelics is primarily focused on their capacities for wisdom, healing, and revelation in the present, not the past. But it is in congruence with the ways in which mind-altering practices are described in Biblical, Talmudic, and mystical texts. The technology is, I think, new. But the purposes of the work are ancient.

4. Gleanings from Visionaries Past

Lastly, when one looks to Jewish visionary texts, rather than evidence of psychedelic use, as our antecedents, we find a trove of ancient wisdom that can inform our practice today, which as I discussed last week, is cause for concern as much as enthusiasm.

For one thing, Jewish tradition and responsible psychedelic practice are also very clear that such journeys are not for everyone, and that they are best taken with preparation, guidance, and integration afterward. The Jewish mystical tradition is full of warnings regarding the mystical path. Probably the most famous is the tale of the four Talmudic rabbis who entered Pardes – paradise. Of the four, only Rabbi Akiva returned as he was. One died, one went mad, and one (Aher) became an apostate. (I’m not sure Aher’s was a negative outcome, but that’s a different article.) Those aren’t good odds, especially for unprepared day trippers. So too the warnings against practicing Kabbalah without the ballast of years, training, and community – boundaries set after the messianic heresies of Sabbetai Zevi and Jacob Frank.

Mysticism and prophecy – whether created by trance practices, fasting, psychedelic medicines, or other forms – can be enormously powerful. They can also destroy a person if there is no preparation, container, guide, community, or integration.

In addition, as I’ve already mentioned, the Jewish prophetic experience is one of oscillation between individual and community. With the exception of the revelation at Sinai, these experiences take place alone or in very small groups. Yet communal forms and norms shape both the contours of prophetic experiences and the integration of them into ethical and ritual life. We bring our hopes, baggage, concepts, assumptions, and theologies with us, even if the peak of the psychedelic experience seems to transcend all of them.

The Ba’al Shem Tov practices a mystical ascent, perhaps drawing on Sufi as well as Jewish techniques of ecstasy, and his experience is thoroughly infused with Yiddishkeit. (Consciously building on that model, Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi wrote about his experiences in the same terms, as an “ascent of the soul.”) We ascend the sacred mountain, but eventually return to the camp below, in a cycle of society and solitude.

What does it mean that these principles derived from the literature of Jewish spiritual experience are applicable to psychedelic spiritual experience as well? I think it points to a continuity of spiritual practice, despite the novelty (for Jews) of the means of ascent. We are doing similar things here, we mystics from across the ages, even as so much is different today. We are living in the alt-neu, the old-new — which is, perhaps, where we Jews have always made our homes.

I have to say, I am really enjoying putting this psychedelic series together for you. Thanks for reading. Most of my time over these last few weeks has been spent on this subject: on projects at Emory and Harvard, and writing these articles.

I’ll be co-leading a five-day silent meditation retreat combining insight meditation and Jewish practice, from December 23-27 in Connecticut. Here’s the info.

Also in the contemplative realm, just wrote yet another excellent piece on what deep contemplative practice is really like. I think Sasha has now done the best writing on this subject of anyone I’ve read.

Here’s some political stuff I’ve benefited from reading on Substack lately:

• published a great quote from transgender member of congress Sarah McBride, who has been treated awfully and responded with dignity and intelligence.

• And on the Bad Guy Beat, did great coverage of the GOP’s plans (real, now that the election is over) to gut social security; did a fantastic piece on Pete Hegseth and masculinity; and did an excellent deep dive into the continued enshittification of X.

Share Both/And with Jay Michaelson

In the last few weeks, I’ve found that practicing Mindfulness of Vedana for brief moments throughout the day has given me a sense of balance and stability. Like other very-short-term meditations I’ve offered here, it doesn’t last very long. But it can give you a brief respite from difficult experiences like anxiety, fear, and anger. And those moments can add up.

Enjoy, and thank you for your support!

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