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

by Jamie Wheal

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later renamed as Osho) broke with Hindu tradition and blazed a wilder path, filled with breath work, sensuality, and lots of Rolls-Royces. Adi Da, born Franklin Jones in Queens, began his spiritual career with some penetrating insights into the human condition. He ended it in exile in Fiji, hounded by allegations of abuse, baffled that the world had not recognized him as the World Savior. Timothy Leary abandoned his academic lineage at Harvard to become a Lysergic Trickster Priest in and out of federal prison. Throw in the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” sex-magician Aleister Crowley, who burned through the Western mystery schools of Europe and left chaos, destruction, and addiction in his wake. L. Ron Hubbard, a sometime protégé of Crowley’s teachings, spun his dabblings into Dianetics and then Scientology. “You don’t get rich writing science fiction,” Hubbard supposedly said to a convention of writers hoping to do exactly that. “If you want to get rich, you start a religion.” On that point, at least, he was true to his word.