Dave Wallace NOT recorded by me, simply a re-upload! Track list: I Hope I Get It – 1:28 I Can Do That – 21:41 At the Ballet – 31:14 Sing! – 39:16 Montage – 41:47 Dance Ten; Looks Three – 1:04:36 The Music and the Mirror – 1:10:49 One – 1:32:05 What I Did for Love – 1:55:25 One (Reprise) – 2:02:16
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Song
The Music and the Mirror
Artist
Charlotte d’Amboise
Writers
Edward Kleban, Marvin Hamlisch
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The School of Life We are used to religions telling us consoling and soothing things; but what we often miss is that science has just as many wise and kindly perspectives on our lives – if only we know how to look. Sign up to our new newsletter and get 10% off your first online order of a book, product or class: https://bit.ly/2TMs0dT For books and more from The School of Life, visit our online shop: https://bit.ly/31nmC31 Our website has classes, articles and products to help you lead a more fulfilled life: https://bit.ly/2DzWhXy FURTHER READING You can read more on this and other subjects on our blog, here: https://bit.ly/2PqfayK “According to a standard heroic secular account, at the start of the modern age and in just a few short decades, science was able to defeat religion through rigour and brilliance – and thereby forever liberated humankind from ignorance and superstition. For centuries, this account explains, religion had essentially been doing some very bad science. It had purported to tell us how old the earth was (4,000 years old), how many suns there were in the universe (one), how evolution had begun (by divine decree) and why rainbows existed (to remind us of God’s promise to Noah). But these lamentable attempts were finally put to an end when science was able to investigate reality with reason, asserted itself against obscurantist priests – and drove religion into the cobwebbed attic it presently resides in. Science didn’t so much replace religion (there was no need) as expunge the scourge altogether from human consciousness. As a result, we can now dwell without fear or meekness and enjoy the fruits of science and its constant, ever more astonishing technological innovations…” MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Watch more films on WORK and CAPITALISM in our playlist: http://bit.ly/TSOLcapitalism You can submit translations and transcripts on all of our videos here: https://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_… Find out how more here: https://support.google.com/youtube/an… SOCIAL MEDIA Feel free to follow us at the links below: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theschoolofl… Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSchoolOfLife Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theschoolof… CREDITS Produced in collaboration with: Deanca Rensyta Mihardja https://www.behance.net/deancarensa5a9 Title animation produced in collaboration with Vale Productions https://www.valeproductions.co.uk/
Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS At Broadway Backwards 2017, Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Jay Armstrong Johnson came together in a giddy, delightful duet of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music. The pair gleefully gallivanted across the stage as a confident Johnson wooed the naive, innocent Keenan-Bolger through a charmingly updated romp through the classic. The 12th Annual Broadway Backwards on March, 13, 2017, where men sing songs intended for women and vice versa without changing pronouns, shattered fundraising records, bringing in an impressive $522,870 to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City. Broadway Backwards creator Robert Bartley wrote and directed this year’s show. It featured choreography by Bartley, Penny Ayn Maas, Christopher Rice and Adam Roberts. Mary-Mitchell Campbell served as music supervisor and Laura Bergquist was music director. The creative team included lighting designer Carolyn Wong, costume designers Jess Gersz and Vanessa Leuck and sound designer Matthew Kraus. The production stage managers were Kaleigh Bernier and Rachael Gass. *** Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS unites theatre artists with theatre lovers to help those in need. Broadway Cares helps men, women and children across the country and across the street receive life saving medications, healthcare, nutritious meals, counseling and emergency financial assistance. Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS awards grants to more than 450 AIDS and family service organizations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. and is the largest single financial supporter of the social service programs of The Actors Fund, helping everyone in entertainment and the performing arts. Broadway Cares hosts two six-week-long fundraising campaigns in theatres across the country every year, one leading up to the Easter Bonnet Competition in April and the other leading up to the Red Bucket Follies in December. Broadway Cares also produces annual fundraising events in New York City, including Broadway Backwards, Broadway Bares and the Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction. JOIN US: youtube.com/BCEFA facebook.com/BCEFA instagram.com/BCEFA twitter.com/BCEFA broadwaycares.org
When Jacob wrestled with the angel in the Bible, they embodied the struggle between sexuality and spirituality. Queer Bible scholars and religious leaders have grappled with the story and artists have created many homoerotic images of the scene over the centuries.
The story of Jacob wrestling (Genesis 32:24-31) will be read at many churches worldwide on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020.
Many have interpreted the story as a struggle between material and spiritual needs, but it is especially powerful for queer people who are trying to reconcile their sexuality and their faith. Jacob refused to give up the fight until he forced a blessing out of God. Like Jacob, LGBTQ people can also win God’s blessing by continuing to wrestle with our faith, regardless of those who condemn as sinners.
Jacob, ancestor and namesake of the Israelites, is also less traditionally masculine compared to his twin brother Esau, so some LGBTQ people identify with him that way too. While Esau was hairy and loved to hunt, Jacob was a smooth-skinned mama’s boy who liked to stay home cooking with his mother.
The story in Genesis begins when Jacob is alone one night. A mysterious stranger comes to him. Scripture refers to the stranger as a man, God, and an angel (Hosea 12:4). He wrestles with Jacob until dawn. Then the angel wants to leave, but Jacob insists, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”
The angel gives him a new name and identity as Israel, which can be translated as “one who has prevailed with God.” Jacob asks to know the angel’s name, but he just gives a blessing and leaves. Alone again, Jacob marvels, “I have seen God face to face and lived.”
Jacob is honored in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Christians, some see the pre-incarnate Christ himself as the mysterious stranger who wrestled with Jacob.
The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel is the basis for a controversial prayer for “unexpected intimacy,” intended to be recited after anonymous sex, in a Jewish prayer book or siddur from a historic LGBTQ synagogue in San Francisco. The prayer by Andrew Ramer is included in “Siddur Shaar Zahav: The All-Inclusive Siddur.”
The prayer begins, “In the dark, in a strange place, our father Jacob encountered a stranger with whom he grappled all night.” It asks God “who created passion and wove it throughout creation” to turn the encounter into a mutual blessing “that allows us to both touch and see the Divine.”
A notable nude and rather homoerotic “Jacob and the Angel” was sculpted by Hendrik Andersen (1872-1940), lover of famed British-American novelist Henry James.
The story raises intriguing questions. What was the nature of the “wrestling” that went on all night long? Whether or not there was an erotic interaction, the friendly conclusion affirms that God wants to relate to human beings as equals. God rewards those who challenge God. ___ Related links: “Wrestling with God” at the Queering the Church Blog is a queer reflection on Jacob and the angel.
___ Top image credit: “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” by Leon Bonnat (1876) Wikimedia Commons
____ This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published in October 2019 and was updated for accuracy and expanded with new material on July 31, 2020.
Founder at Q SpiritKittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
Pika Grape Snack Homosexuality was considered a mental illness until the 1970s. See also: “Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis” https://amzn.to/2OfDhPW This psychiatric interview is with a male adolescent demonstrating a schizophrenic reaction. The patient describes fantasies, “grey dreams” and other hallucinations that have been occurring recently. After a general discussion, the patient explain guilt and embarrassment associated with being gay. The differential diagnosis given is homosexuality. Can anyone from that era tell by his (admittedly somewhat generic) clothing if this was filmed in the early 60s or late 60s? The film was published in 1969, but I have some suspicion it was filmed in 1963. I haven’t been able to confirm either way For more content like you see on this channel https://www.patreon.com/PikaGrapeSnack
Novavax’s coronavirus vaccine generates promising immune response in early trial, data shows. A Phase I trial involving 131 participants for Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate showed encouraging early results. According to Novavax, the vaccine produced neutralizing antibodies at a higher rate than even those seen in recovered patients.
“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, despairs, and patterned desires. And yet there is something profoundly paradoxical about such an appeal to reason in the notion that we can exercise prudence in matters of love — to have loved is to have known the straitjacket of irrationality that slips over even the most willful mind when the heart takes over with its delicious carelessness.
How to heed Augustine’s caution, not by subjugating but by better understanding our experience of love, is what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) explores in her least known but in many ways most beautiful work, Love and Saint Augustine (public library) — Arendt’s first book-length manuscript and the last to be published in English, posthumously salvaged from her papers by political scientist Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and philosopher Judith Chelius Stark.
Hannah Arendt (photograph by Fred Stein, 1944); Saint Augustine (painting by Gerard Seghers, circa 1600-1650.)
For half a century after she wrote it as her doctoral thesis in 1929 — a time when this apostle of reason, who would become one of the twentieth century’s keenest and most coolly analytical minds, was composing her fiery love letters to Martin Heidegger — Arendt obsessively revised and annotated the manuscript. Against Augustine’s whetstone, she came to hone her core philosophical ideas — chiefly the troublesome disconnect she saw between philosophy and politics as evidenced by the rise of ideologies like totalitarianism, the origins of which she so memorably and incisively examined. It was from Augustine that she borrowed the phrase amor mundi — “love of the world” — which would become a defining feature of her philosophy. Occupied by questions of why we succumb to and normalize evil, Arendt identified as the root of tyranny the act of making other human beings irrelevant. Again and again, she returned to Augustine for the antidote: love.
But while this ancient notion of neighborly love, which would come to inspire Martin Luther King, was central to Arendt’s philosophical concern and her interest in Augustine, its political significance is inseparable from the deepest wellspring of love: the personal. For all of the political and philosophical wisdom she draws from it, Augustine’s Confessions is animated by his experience of personal love — that eternal force that governs the Sun and the Moon and the stars of our interior lives, reflected and codified in our cultural and social structures.
Illustration from An ABZ of Love, Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite vintage Danish guide to sexuality
With an eye to Augustine’s conception of love as “a kind of craving” — the Latin appetitus, from which the word appetite is derived — and his assertion that “to love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake,” Arendt considers this directional desire propelling love:
Every craving is tied to a definite object, and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement is set by the goal toward which it moves. For, as Augustine writes, love is “a kind of motion, and all motion is toward something.” What determines the motion of desire is always previously given. Our craving aims at a world we know; it does not discover anything new. The thing we know and desire is a “good,” otherwise we would not seek it for its own sake. All the goods we desire in our questing love are independent objects, unrelated to other objects. Each of them represents nothing but its isolated goodness. The distinctive trait of this good that we desire is that we do not have it. Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss. In that case the desire to have turns into a fear of losing. As a quest for the particular good rather than for things at random, desire is a combination of “aiming at” and “referring back to.” It refers back to the individual who knows the world’s good and evil and seeks to live happily. It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires. Craving, or love, is a human being’s possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make him happy, that is, of gaining possession of what is most his own.
That is why a generous and unpossessive love — a love undiminished by the failure to attain the good for which it craves — can seem like a feat nothing short of superhuman. (“If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me,” Arendt’s good friend and great admirer W.H. Auden wrote in his sublime ode to that superhuman triumph of the heart.) But a love predicated on possession, Arendt cautions, inevitably turns into fear — the fear of losing what was gained. Two millennia after Epictetus offered his cure for heartbreak in the acceptance that all things are perishable and therefore even love ought to be held with the loose fingers of nonattachment, Arendt — who notes Augustine’s debt to the Stoics — writes:
So long as we desire temporal things, we are constantly under this threat, and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have. Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man, who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.
The present is not determined by the future as such… but by certain events which we hope for or fear from the future, and which we accordingly crave and pursue, or shun and avoid. Happiness consists in possession, in having and holding our good, and even more in being sure of not losing it. Sorrow consists in having lost our good and in enduring this loss. However, for Augustine the happiness of having is not contrasted by sorrow but by fear of losing. The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake.
Death, of course, is the ultimate loss — of love as well as life — and therefore the ultimate object of our future-oriented dread. And yet this escape from presence via the portal of anxiety — perhaps the commonest malady to which human beings are susceptible — is itself a living death. Arendt writes:
In their fear of death, those living fear life itself, a life that is doomed to die… The mode in which life knows and perceives itself is worry. Thus the object of fear comes to be fear itself. Even if we should assume that there is nothing to fear, that death is no evil, the fact of fear (that all living things shun death) remains.
A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die. In this frustration love turns about and its object becomes a negation, so that nothing is to be desired except freedom from fear. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future.
If presence — the removal of expectancy — is a prerequisite for a true experience of love, then time is the elemental infrastructure of love. Nearly half a century later, in becoming the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures in the 85-year history of the series, Arendt would make this notion of time as the locus of our thinking ego a centerpiece of her landmark lecture, The Life of the Mind. Now, quoting from Augustine’s writings, she considers the paradox of love beyond time for creatures as temporal as we are:
Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” where time can be conserved long enough to be measured, and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, transcend both life and time?
Time exists only insofar as it can be measured, and the yardstick by which we measure it is space.
For Augustine, she notes, memory is the space in which time is measured and cached:
Memory, the storehouse of time, is the presence of the “no more” (iam non) as expectation is the presence of the “not yet” (nondum). Therefore, I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it. It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
One of the major themes I explore in Figuring is this question of the temporality of even our lushest experiences. “The union of two natures for a time is so great,” Margaret Fuller — one of my key figures — wrote. Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”? The time scales are elastic, contract- ing and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity. Fuller’s exclamation upon seeing the paintings of Correggio for the first time, overcome with beauty she had not known before, radiates a larger truth about the human heart: “Sweet soul of love! I should weary of you, too; but it was glorious that day.”
The Now is what measures time backwards and forwards, because the Now, strictly speaking, is not time but outside time. In the Now, past and future meet. For a fleeting moment they are simultaneous so that they can be stored up by memory, which remembers things past and holds the expectation of things to come. For a fleeting moment (the temporal Now) it is as though time stands still, and it is this Now that becomes Augustine’s model of eternity.
Augustine himself captures this transcendent temporality:
Who will hold [the heart], and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable… but that all this while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present.
Arendt hones in on the heart of the paradox:
What prevents man from “living” in the timeless present is life itself, which never “stands still.” The good for which love craves lies beyond all mere desires. If it were merely a question of desiring, all desires would end in fear. And since whatever confronts life from the outside as the object of its craving is sought for life’s sake (a life we are going to lose), the ultimate object of all desires is life itself. Life is the good we ought to seek, namely true life.
She returns to desire, which simultaneously takes us out of life and plunges us into it:
Desire mediates between subject and object, and it annihilates the distance between them by transforming the subject into a lover and the object into the beloved. For the lover is never isolated from what he loves; he belongs to it… Since man is not self-sufficient and therefore always desires something outside himself, the question of who he is can only be resolved by the object of his desire and not, as the Stoics thought, by the suppression of the impulse of desire itself: “Such is each as is his love” [Augustine wrote]. Strictly speaking, he who does not love and desire at all is a nobody.
[…]
Man as such, his essence, cannot be defined because he always desires to belong to something outside himself and changes accordingly… If he could be said to have an essential nature at all, it would be lack of self-sufficiency. Hence, he is driven to break out of his isolation by means of love… for happiness, which is the reversal of isolation, more is required than mere belonging. Happiness is achieved only when the beloved becomes a permanently inherent element of one’s own being.
It is stunning to trace the line of these ideas across Arendt’s life of the mind. Decades after her doctoral days, she would compose her influential treatise on how tyrants use isolation as a weapon of oppression — totalitarianism, in other words, is not only the denial of love but an assault on the essence of human beings.
Russell’s observations on the value of leisure were made in an era of mass unemployment – and they are just as pertinent today.
BY MAX HAYWARD
August 5, 2020 (newstatesman.com)
DAN KITWOOD / GETTY IMAGES A beach in Margate, May 2020.
We are used to thinking of idleness as a vice, something to be ashamed of. But when the British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote “In Praise of Idleness” in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, idleness was an unavoidable reality for the millions who had lost their jobs. Russell realised that his society didn’t just need to confront the crisis of mass unemployment. He called for nothing less than a total re-evaluation of work – and of leisure.
Russell believed that we don’t only need to reform the economic system in which some are worked to the bone while others suffer jobless destitution, we also need to challenge the cultural ethic that teaches us to value ourselves in proportion to our capacity for “economically productive” labour. Human beings are more than just workers. We need to learn how to value idleness.
Russell’s call could hardly be more relevant today, as we face the prospect of another great recession. Millions may lose their jobs in the coming months and, as automation and technology continue to advance, the jobs lost during the pandemic may never return.
Today, reformers point to the possibility of a universal basic income as a way to prevent widespread poverty. But, as many have learned while locked down at home on government-sponsored furloughs, a life without work can feel desolate even when supported by a steady income. Does a jobless future condemn us to live less meaningful lives?
In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, within a century, advances in productivity would allow inhabitants of developed countries to maintain a decent standard of living while working 15 hours a week. If that prediction now looks laughable, it failed for reasons that Russell foresaw.
Recalling the famous example of the pin factory that Adam Smith used to explain the division of labour, Russell imagined a new technology that will halve the amount of time it takes to make a pin. If the market for pins is already saturated, what will happen?
In a sane world, Russell thought, the factory would simply halve working hours, maintaining the same wages but greatly increasing the time that the workers could devote to the joys of leisure. But, as Russell observed, this rarely happens. Instead, the factory owner will opt to keep half the workers on the same hours and lay off the rest. The gains from the advances of technology will be realised not as an expansion of leisure but rather as drudgery for some and jobless destitution for others, with the savings enjoyed only by the winner, the factory owner.
Looking back over the past century, we can see Russell’s predictions borne out. Technological breakthroughs lead to layoffs and even when employment recovers we find that, rather than working less to maintain the same level of wealth, our society is one in which people work ever more while accumulating material goods that bring them little joy. Every year we throw away millions of items of clothing, old gadgets, used cars. Why don’t we have more free time instead?
The solution, as Russell saw it, was not only economic and political but also moral and cultural. Keynes’s vision of a 15-hour work-week seems unthinkable because modern societies have inherited an ethic that prizes work – economically productive labour – as the source of meaning in life. To be good is to work hard and so we value ourselves by the hours we log, even if most paid work is tedious and unpleasant.
In its origins, Russell speculated, this ethic of work was a tool of social control, a hypocritical doctrine propounded by leisured aristocrats and slaveowners to justify their oppression of the vast labouring class on whom they depended. Until we liberate ourselves from this ideal, we will never gain the true value that technological advances offer us: the value of leisure.
Yet as the tedium of lockdown showed many of us, enjoying idleness is not so easy. This is not to dismiss the value of passive consumption and relaxation. But, as the weeks turned into months, the pleasures of Netflix in pyjamas and endlessly scrolling Twitter started to fade.
Even the company (real or virtual) of friends and family can start to pall when you discover – as so many did during their confinement – that you have nothing new to talk about. Relationships are a source of meaning, but they need to be structured around other meaningful activities. So how can we find meaning in leisure?
A first step lies in education. Schools and universities are not only valuable because they prepare us for work, but also because they prepare us for leisure. The arts, humanities, and pure sciences are often derided as useless. But someone who reads about physics or philosophy for fun, who paints pots or plays an instrument, who writes novels or makes films, is equipped to find meaning in their lives beyond the workplace. Russell argued that a central goal of education was to equip the population with the necessary abilities, knowledge and habits to enjoy creative leisure. This would mean reform: access to higher education would need to be greatly expanded, while university and school curricula should place as much emphasis on creative arts and the pursuit of pure curiosity as on employable skills.
That might sound idealistic. Educators are constantly called upon to demonstrate the economic value of their degrees. But this only demonstrates another sickness of our society, the complement of the cult of work: the assumption that all value must be measured in sterling.
In a different way, the current crisis has already eroded this idea: zealots aside, we have realised that it is worth taking an economic hit in order to preserve health. That, after all, is what money is for. Economic output is a means, not an end. Health is truly, intrinsically valuable. If we value health for itself, why not also recognise the intrinsic value of learning?
Schools instruct children in sports, and we do not call this useless, even though most students will not go on to become professional athletes. Similarly, we do not insist that schools focus on those sports whose skills are most easily transferred to the workplace.
Sports education is valuable because it promotes health and the joy of play. If we think that schools and universities should promote physical health and that physical play is a good in itself, why not acknowledge that they should also equip students for mental play and mental flourishing?
The society that Russell imagines, the society that invests in meaningful idleness, is truly revolutionary – not just because its economic structures have been reformed, but because it has changed the way it understands, and values, itself.
We are used to comparing the success of countries in terms of GDP. When we do this, we must deem one society a relative failure if its citizens earn on average £1,000 a year less than its neighbours, even if they have more leisure, play more sports, take more walks, read more books, listen to more music, and paint more pictures. But we are not doomed to think in this way. We should follow Russell’s advice, and learn to relish the fruits of idleness.
Max Hayward is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. This article is part of the Agora series, a collaboration between the New Statesman and Aaron James Wendland, Professor of Philosophy at the Higher School of Economics. He tweets @ajwendland.
Health Minister Patty Hajdu has granted four people with terminal cancer access to psilocybin mushrooms through an exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.
The Canadian government is allowing people with terminal cancer to legally consume psychedelic mushrooms as part of their end-of-life care, a decision that’s expected to pave the way for more people to access psilocybin therapy.
Psilocybin and psilocin, the active ingredients in magic mushrooms, are prohibited under Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, unless an exception is made for a clinical trial.
On Tuesday, Health Minister Patty Hajdu approved the use of psilocybin for four people with incurable cancer under a Section 56 exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Health
This is the first known time such an exemption has been granted specifically for the consumption of mushrooms, according to TheraPsil, a nonprofit organization that advocates for psychedelic therapy in end-of-life care in Canada.
While more research is needed, a study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in January found that psilocybin use in patients with life-threatening cancer resulted in a reduction in anxiety, depression, and hopelessness for prolonged periods of time.
In a news release by TheraPsil, Laurie Brooks, one of the patients granted an exemption, said she hopes the decision will lead to more Canadians being able to access psilocybin without having to wait months for the government’s permission. Health
“The acknowledgement of the pain and anxiety that I have been suffering with means a lot to me, and I am feeling quite emotional today as a result,” Brooks said.
Some U.S. cities, including Denver and Oakland, have decriminalized possession of mushrooms. In Jamaica, where mushrooms are legal, psilocybin retreats are available as a form of dealing with personal issues and trauma.
In Canada, legal access to medical cannabis also started with a Section 56 exemption.
Ged, the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, was called Sparrowhawk in his reckless youth.
Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death’s threshold to restore the balance.
(Goodreads.com)
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Every craving is tied to a definite object, and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement is set by the goal toward which it moves. For, as Augustine writes, love is “a kind of motion, and all motion is toward something.” What determines the motion of desire is always previously given. Our craving aims at a world we know; it does not discover anything new. The thing we know and desire is a “good,” otherwise we would not seek it for its own sake. All the goods we desire in our questing love are independent objects, unrelated to other objects. Each of them represents nothing but its isolated goodness. The distinctive trait of this good that we desire is that we do not have it. Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss. In that case the desire to have turns into a fear of losing. As a quest for the particular good rather than for things at random, desire is a combination of “aiming at” and “referring back to.” It refers back to the individual who knows the world’s good and evil and seeks to live happily. It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires. Craving, or love, is a human being’s possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make him happy, that is, of gaining possession of what is most his own.
