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

by Jamie Wheal

Four of the most potent and accessible physical drivers to shape consciousness and culture and help us build Meaning 3.0 are: Respiration—We are hard-coded to ensure our oxygen supply remains constant, so modulating breathing is one of the surest-fire ways to shift physical and psychological states. Embodiment—The core regulators of our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system play an enormous role in our health, well-being, and stress resilience. They are the metronome of our physiology that sets the rhythm of our lived experiences. Sexuality—If we do not procreate we die. So there are tons of neurochemical drivers baked into our systems to ensure we do. Understanding them allows a powerful reorientation to this central life-giving activity. 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.”