Only once before have I bought a book before its publication date. On April 26, 2021 Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind by Jamie Wheal arrived and I immediately started reading it. It lived up to my high expectations.
The theme in the Introduction was very familiar to me, both at an intellectual level and a deeply experiential level. Wheal asserts that, generally, Religion as a source of meaning collapsed for many people. Then Global Liberalism as a source of meaning began collapsing. Consequently, today we have a meaning crisis.
I lost my Christian faith at midlife and religion became meaningless to me. For the next twenty years I self identified as a secular humanist with a global liberalism worldview. That began to change in 2015 and I have now stopped believing that incremental progress is probable. Like Wheal, I now believe we are in a liminal time and that both breakthrough and breakdown are possible. I am inspired by Wheal’s efforts to do all he can to make a breakthrough scenario more likely.
Wheal has written a book for average and ordinary people like me.
So what about the 99 percent—the rest of us? What about that great silent majority of people around the world who just want a decent chance to keep on keeping on?
Part One: Choose Your Own Apocalypse takes a detailed look at the meaning crisis.
It also makes a case that many of our efforts to cope, whether anxiety and denial, or tribalism and identity politics, are making things worse.
I was particularly interested in Wheal’s assessment of the Four Horsemen - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.
But the New Atheists’ reports of the Death of Belief were slightly exaggerated. The Four Horsemen were only half right. While the “reasonable” might have been stepping away from orthodox belief, many others were finding themselves pushed to the edges. Lacking anywhere else to center themselves, fundamentalism and nihilism were picking up the stragglers.
I have also become increasingly grateful that I was, luckily, born in 1951.
Coming out of World War II, the past fifty-odd years were an anomaly all their own. Three generations of Americans have been living in a bubble… That fluky period was so unique that historians even gave it a name—Pax Americana—or “American Peace.” ...Replay the American Experiment a thousand times on a computer simulation, and many of the truths we hold to be self-evident turn out to be not much more than good luck and timing.
In my opinion, Jamie Wheal has considerable insight into the problems we face and that gives me some confidence in the solutions he offers later in his book.
...there are three key drivers that affect our ability to make sense of the future: our cognitive complexity, our sacred cows, and our ability to grieve. If we are not up for tackling all three head-on, we’ll get stuck. Manage all three, and we can begin to make sense of the scope and scale of change we’re facing.
As we search for some kind of coherent explanation for a world in turmoil, everyone’s favorite mythologies are smashing, crashing, and blending into each other.
I am more than a little intrigued by one of the solutions Wheal identifies.
So the question for us is what Meaning 3.0 might look like… We need to reinvent religion.
Part Two: The Alchemist Cookbook moves forward from an analysis of our present condition to the design of a framework for potential solutions. Wheal identifies three needs to be satisfied, the needs for inspiration, healing and connection. He identifies five areas where he will share insights - breathing movement, sexuality, music and psychedelic substances.
Chapter 5: Respiration dovetailed nicely with another book I read recently, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. This is an area of my life in which I have already added new practices. Nitrous oxide, the laughing gas, is an experience that I am open to.
These days, breath work is having a bit of a moment.
The more we can familiarize ourselves with the edges of our physiology, the more control we have at the edges of our psychology.
Despite a host of complicated names and specific techniques, all of these different breathing practices break down into roughly three categories: acceleration, brakes, and steering.
By changing how we breathe, we can tune the dials on waking consciousness—as easily and powerfully as any other method we have.
I heartily endorse the basic premises of Chapter 6: Embodiment. At age fifteen I discovered that jogging significantly helped me manage my moods and I have been a runner ever since. But Wheal shares some insights from outside of current norms, from the BDSM community and surprising connections with the treatment of PTSD.
The human experience, despite all of its abstraction, complexity, and self-consciousness, is, at a biological level, unnervingly basic… As much as we might dance around it, or seek to repress our core physicality, it is an essential and unavoidable part of the human experience. It’s not that our animal selves lie in contradiction to our angel selves. Our animal selves are literally our stairway to heaven.
Chapter 7: Music would probably not be controversial with most Baby Boomers, but would not be accepted by our parents, certainly not by my mother.
So when concerned mothers and fathers of the 1950s and ’60s fretted about the destabilizing power of rock music on their impressionable children, when they lamented that Elvis, Beatlemania, and Woodstock heralded the decline of civilization, they had it backward. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll weren’t the end of civilization, they were its beginning… we have always been chasing the unity and transcendence that music has provided.
Although attitudes towards psychoactive drugs are changing rapidly, in Chapter 8: Sacraments Jamie Wheal seems to be at the very leading edge of thinking.
...psychoactive sacraments are as old as human culture, there’s an increasingly urgent need for them these days.
A rite-of-passage initiation into adulthood with 3 grams of psilocybin, surrounded by elders, mentors, and peers, could fit here. This is the “Goldilocks dosage” perfected by Johns Hopkins to prompt insight and healing without excessive destabilization.
Chapters 9 and 10 focus on sexuality. I will not comment publicly on these chapters except to say that I find nothing Wheal writes problematic. Getting sexuality right may be one of the biggest challenges in any attempt to break through to a much better world.
In Chapter 11: An Immodest Proposal presents Jamie Wheal’s framework for a path forward.
Hedonic engineering. A deliberate set of neurophysiological practices designed to combine peak experiences in service of healing, integration, and connection.
Because of my own experience, I was very engaged by the title of Part III: Ethical Cult Building. For twenty-five years I was a member of a benign Christian cult. This is a subject I know well.
...it’s essential for us to start small, go slowly, and forge intimate, deeply trusting connections with others as we find our way forward… we need to know that our travel partners have our backs, even and especially when we might be losing our grip… the three most common forms of friendship—the transactional, the hedonistic, and the virtuous… The virtuous relationship is a much rarer and more valuable commitment.
The next step is creating or expanding networks of these connections.
There is a warning in Chapter 12: Everybody Worships.
...anytime you uncork powerful experiences of ecstasis and catharsis, you tend to get boundary-dissolving, inhibition-lowering communitas hot on their heels.
We’re freshly vulnerable to cultic tendencies. There are a host of reasons for this... But here are four that seem to be reinforcing each other these days:
Generational Amnesia...
Techniques of Ecstasy...
Digital Influencer Culture...
Rapture Ideologies…
This chapter contains an excellent, detailed checklist of what not to do.
What to do is covered in Chapter 13: The Ethical Cult(ure) Toolbox.
These guidelines are intended as an open-source charter agreement by which different groups might voluntarily agree to play in the domains of ecstasis, catharsis, and communitas.
So that’s it—the Ethical Culture Tool Kit for creating coherent communities. Metaphysics, Ethics, Sacraments, Scriptures, and Deities.
All things considered, I still consider my twenty-five years in an unhealthy community as a net positive experience for me personally. I now have a strong desire to be part of very healthy communities. Recapture the Rapture points a way, a path that seems very good to me.
I do not know if I fully embrace the scenario Wheal presents in Chapter 14: Team Omega, but I do know that I want to play a part, however small, in bringing about a radically better world.
...about the split between those committed to the global-centric Infinite Game and the ethnocentric Finite Game. The Infinite Game—which recognizes everyone’s right to play and seeks to extend the Game to more and more players… Those who refuse to take that step and remain separate will be advocates of the Finite Game, who seek to win while others lose, and keep the spoils of the game for themselves.
It’s only when we die to our stories, our hopes, our fears, our pleasure, our pain, that we can glimpse what lies beyond all of them.
Chapter 15: Pondering the Yonder gives “four explanations for where the information in peak states comes from” and the first three would not be controversial. The fourth explanation reminded me of the Source which Ria Baeck writes about in her book Collective Presencing. I wondered whether the Design Realm, Akashic field, Information Layer and Source are somehow, more or less, the same thing.
Chapter 15 may be uncomfortable for some readers but overall I found it inspiring.
We’re storytelling monkeys who cannot, will not, let the Mystery stay the Mystery… considers the notion of a non-local source of all that inspiration… Amazing space, how sweet the sound, we were blind, but now we see… We’re never fully fixed. We’re never totally broken… HomeGrown humans, being human, doing human, grieving human. Down among the people, with helping hands.
In an interview, Jamie Wheal shared that some of the people who helped him with the publication of Recapture the Rapture advised him not to include his Conclusion: The Four Horsemen Cometh. It is dark, very dark. But the book would have been incomplete without it.
Our courage is always there, dormant but potent. When we act on it, it sends shock waves through time and space. That’s the only exponential curve that bends in the right direction these days…
The final horse we need to saddle up is Radical Hope. Regular old “whistling past the graveyard” hope won’t be enough to save us from our demons or the darkness. We’re going to need something stronger.
It’s an impossible task, and we have to try anyway. We have everything we need to remake our world. We can affirm who we are and what we’ve forgotten. We can learn to weep rather than whimper. We can find our brothers and sisters who hear the truth in what we say.
The book has an excellent Glossary, useful for anyone not familiar with the language of those playing the Infinite Game.
Infinite game: James Carse’s conceptualization of infinite games—where the point of the game is to keep on playing, as opposed to a finite game, where the point is to win. In the infinite game, one plays with the rules rather than playing within the rules.
The Appendix: Sexual Yoga of Becoming Study - The Power of Stacking describes Wheal’s fascinating research study.
My book report on Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind by Jamie Wheal is no substitute for the book itself, merely a taste of its awesome flavour.