Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost its Mind

by Jamie Wheal

As Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson once put it, “We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

To break this stalemate we might have to give up our search for common ground, to meet each other on higher ground.

That’s what connection does—it gives us a chance to share the burden and absurdity of life with others.

Substances—Humans, and most other animals, routinely seek to shift states as part of their learning, growing, and mending. Ron Siegel at UCLA has even gone as far as calling the intentional pursuit of intoxication a “fourth drive—a desire to feel different, to achieve a rapid change in one’s state” that is “as much a part of the human condition as sex, hunger, and thirst.”

That’s the challenge in front of us: to engineer Ecstasis without the Crave (of addiction to altered

states), prompt Catharsis without the Cringe (of indulgent self-help), and create Communitas without the Cult (of unreliable leaders and followers).

Finally, this study delivered proof of what Yeshe Tsogyal so fearlessly demonstrated over a thousand years ago in the mountains of Tibet. That women are smarter. And possibly more enlightened. Women appear to be even better suited to experience transcendence through sex than men.