Recapture the Rapture

Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind

Jamie Wheal

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062905499
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

"A highly personal, richly informed and culturally wide-ranging meditation on the loss of meaning in our times and on pathways to rediscovering it." —Gabor Maté, MD, author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction

A neuroanthropologist maps out a revolutionary new practice—Hedonic Engineering—that combines the best of neuroscience and optimal psychology. It's an intensive program of breathing, movement, and sexuality that mends trauma, heightens inspiration and tightens connections—helping us wake up, grow up, and show up for a world that needs us all.

This is a book about a big idea. And the idea is this: Slowly over the past few decades, and now suddenly, all at once, we're suffering from a collapse in Meaning. Fundamentalism and nihilism are filling that vacuum, with consequences that affect us all. In a world that needs us at our best, diseases of despair, tribalism, and disaster fatigue are leaving us at our worst.

It's vital that we regain control of the stories we're telling because they are shaping the future we're creating. To do that, we have to remember our deepest inspiration, heal our pain and apathy, and connect to each other like never before. If we can do that, we've got a shot at solving the big problems we face. And if we can't? Well, the dustbin of history has swallowed civilizations older and fancier than ours.

This book is divided into three parts. The first, Choose Your Own Apocalypse, takes a look at our current Meaning Crisis--where we are today, why it's so hard to make sense of the world, what might be coming next, and what to do about it. It also makes a case that many of our efforts to cope, whether anxiety and denial, or tribalism and identity politics, are likely making things worse.

The middle section, The Alchemist Cookbook, applies the creative firm IDEO's design thinking to the Meaning Crisis. This is where the book gets hands on--taking a look at the strongest evolutionary drivers that can bring about inspiration, healing, and connection. From breathing, to movement, sexuality, music, and substances--these are the everyday tools to help us wake up, grow up, and show up. AKA--how to blow yourself sky high with household materials. And the best part? They're accessible, by anyone anywhere, no middleman required. Transcendence democratized.

The final third of the book, Ethical Cult Building, focuses on the tricky nature of putting these kinds of experiences into gear and into culture—because, anytime in the past when we've figured out combinations of peak states and deep healing, we've almost always ended up with problematic culty communities. Playing with fire has left a lot of people burned. This section lays out a roadmap for sparking a thousand fires around the world--each one unique and tailored to the needs and values of its participants. Think of it as an open-source toolkit for building ethical culture.

In Recapture the Rapture, we're taking radical research out of the extremes and applying it to the mainstream--to the broader social problem of healing, believing, and belonging. It's providing answers to the questions we face: how to replace blind faith with direct experience, how to move from broken to whole, and how to cure isolation with connection. Said even more plainly, it shows us how to revitalize our bodies, boost our creativity, rekindle our relationships, and answer once and for all the questions of why we are here and what do we donow?

In a world that needs the best of us from the rest of us, this is a book that shows us how to get it done.

Part I
Choose Your Own Apocalypse

the poem at the end of the world

is the poem the little girl breathes

into her pillow the one

she cannot tell the one

there is no one to hear this poem

is a political poem is a war poem is a

universal poem but is not about

these things this poem

is about one human heart this poem

is the poem at the end of the world

—Lucille Clifton

A Cinderella Story

First, we’re going to have to take stock of how we got into our current predicament. We’re going to have to account for all the places we’ve traded courage for comfort, dedication for distraction, and inspiration for information. Put simply, as we untangle this tale, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Which, if you think about it, shouldn’t be too surprising. The whole worse-before-better roller-coaster ride is practically baked into our script. When Kurt Vonnegut, author of modern classics like Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, he found that all stories share only a handful of basic shapes.

According to Vonnegut, you can trace any narrative by the rise and fall of the main characters’ fortunes. He identified certain standbys, like the well-worn “Rags to Riches” story (Down then Up), and the “Boy meets Girl” tale where a couple meets each other, then loses each other, then gets each other back (Up then Down then Up again).

But of all the possible shapes Vonnegut discovered, he noticed that the Cinderella Story (Down then Up, then Really Down then Really Up) was the most compelling. We can’t get enough of her Lowly Beginnings (sweeping ashes, crummy sisters, lousy stepmother), steady Climb to the Top (fairy godmothers, fancy outfits, dancing with the prince), Precipitous Drop (stroke of midnight, pumpkin coaches, lost slipper), and a Happily Ever After that set the bar for all the rest.

And that, more or less, is the shape of our story too. Only we’re joining this narrative halfway through. For almost all of history, life was nastier, more brutal, and shorter than we might have liked (Down). Then, industrial, scientific, and democratic revolutions gave us lightbulbs, indoor plumbing, voting rights, vaccines, and smartphones. We’ve been living longer, learning more, and lacking for little (Up).

Until today, where we pick up the thread—at the stroke of midnight, on the verge of losing it all. As of January 2021, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, which tracks existential threats to humanity, reads one hundred seconds to twelve. That’s the closest we’ve been to Armageddon since the Clock started tracking these things in 1947. The 2020 United Nations Climate Report gave us a decade to figure out the planet or face increasingly severe consequences. Geopolitics, extreme weather, famine, refugees, war, superviruses, cyberterrorism, and existential despair clog our newsfeeds and defy simple solutions (potentially Really Really Down).

The smartest and best informed are the most freaked out. The rest of us flip-flop between feeling anxious and pretending it’s not happening. But if we can focus, there’s a solid shot at redemption on the other side of that descent—a chance for the biggest Happily Ever After ever.

Buckminster Fuller might have said it best when he described a future that works “for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” That sounds like a pretty good Up to shoot for.

There’s one important catch, though: The second half of our Cinderella story is 100 percent up for grabs. Who gets to write those final chapters is writing for all of us, and our children. And their children. So whether it’s pumpkins or princes, disaster or happily ever after—all depends on what we do next.