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

by Jamie Wheal

That “God-shaped hole in our hearts” that Blaise Pascal grieved for is real. If we don’t fill it, nihilism will. But for secular progressives, talking about belief, about faith, about meaning is the third rail of polite conversation.

IDEO’s method is based on three principles: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. In the first phase, Inspiration, you “learn directly from the people you’re designing for as you come to deeply understand their needs.” In the second phase, Ideation, “you’ll prototype possible solutions.” And in the final phase, Implementation, “you’ll bring your solution to life and eventually, to market.” So that’s what this book is about—bringing a Human-Centered Design process to the challenge of Meaning.

If Meaning 3.0 stands a chance of helping our current crises, it needs to be broadly relevant and locally adaptive. To do that, it should borrow three design criteria from scientific modernism (Meaning 2.0) to make it as inclusive as possible—Open Source, Scalability, and Anti-Fragility.

“We are perhaps entering an era,” Harvard-trained theorist Zak Stein recently wrote, “where billions may watch while millions die.”

Seed a revolution, don't lead a revolution.

Once we have design criteria for Meaning 3.0 in place—Open Source, Scalable, and Anti-fragile that support inclusion—we should decide what functionality we need to include from traditional religion (Meaning 1.0) that prompt salvation.

There are a lot of ways to map the functions of faith, but the Sacred Design Lab at Harvard Divinity School has distilled them down to three core elements: Beyond, Becoming, and Belonging. Three essential nutrients vital to human flourishing. Or put another way, inspiration, healing, and connection.

The ancient Greeks called those three ecstasis, catharsis, and communitas. While they go by different names, their role supporting human flourishing is essential. They are how we wake up, grow up, ...

Studies show that experiences of awe can relieve stress, improve life satisfaction, decrease physical pain, and alleviate depression. It’s so central to our well-being that even our primate cousins are in on the act.

Brain waves shift from agitated beta frequency to slower, more reflective alpha, theta, and delta states and bypass the normal gatekeepers of our mind. We find ourselves less distracted, more attentive, and more inventive in these states.

“There are moments that stand out from the chaos of everyday as shining beacons,” University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi writes. “In many ways, one might say that the whole effort of humankind through millennia of history has been to capture these fleeting moments of fulfillment and make them a part of everyday existence” [emphasis added].

Nearly one in ten of us will be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in our lifetimes. The rest of us suffer micro-PTSD nearly all the time. Having a way to digest our grief, rather than choke on it, becomes essential. As Bessel van der Kolk writes, our bodies really do keep the score. Our nervous systems accumulate stressors until we’re fibrillating messes. Once we’re in a hijacked state, we are less perceptive, resilient, and resourceful. We are then more likely to stumble and make things worse.

Hurt people, the old joke goes, hurt people. It would be funnier if it weren’t so true.

The technical term for this kind of togetherness—the profound and healing kind—is what University of Chicago anthropologist Victor Turner calls communitas. It means a merging with the collective that transcends our personal separation. Quakers call it a “gathered meeting”—a collection of souls sharing a connection of spirit.

Keith Sawyer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill calls it “group flow”—that experience shared by sports teams and jazz bands alike—where individual decision-making merges with a collective intelligence. That experience, Sawyer noted, is so profound that it is up to three times as rewarding as an isolated peak experience.

viable candidate for Meaning 3.0 will need to fulfill the pro-social functions of traditional 1.0 Faith—Inspiration, Healing, and Connection. And, to stand a chance of helping the world, it needs to fulfill the inclusive promise of 2.0 Modernism, and be Open Source, Scalable, and Anti-fragile.

In the same way that culture sits upstream from politics, biology sits upstream from psychology. That means in the war for hearts and minds, we should be paying much more attention to our bodies and brains.

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.”

To those four we can add the most ancient and effective amplifier of experience: Music—From ancient fireside chants to cathedrals to chain gangs to concerts, music has accompanied us on the journey of human civilization.

Respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances, and music supporting inspiration, healing, and connection.

Virtually all societies strictly channel access to “techniques of ecstasy,” to borrow Mircea Eliade’s memorable phrase, into approved forms.

No civilization worth its salt hasn’t tightly prescribed access to these five forces. Otherwise nothing remotely “civilized” would ever get done.

We’re all different in how comfortable a clear-eyed look at this content will make us. In general, though, our responses will roughly align with one of three personality types: the Hedonist, the Conformist, and the Purist. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each position should give us a helpful handle on finding our way forward.

As Michael Pollan put it, “Cannabis pleasures our minds in order to use our feet.”

The difference between a tonic and a toxin, the Renaissance alchemist Paracelsus reminds us, is always the dose.

But our endocannabinoid system can help us soften those haunting memories. It lets us “temporarily forget most of the baggage we usually bring to our perception,” Michael Pollan explains. “[It] restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world . . . the cannabinoids open a space for something nearer to direct experience. . . . There is another word for this extremist noticing . . . and that word, of course, is wonder.”

“Spiritual rebirth in the American Religion . . . is far closer to the patterns of Hermeticism than to doctrinal European Christianity,” Yale historian Harold Bloom writes in Omens of the Millennium. Bloom’s saying that American spirituality has always been more subversive, more mystical, and more experiential than either the Protestant or Catholic churches of Europe would have allowed. Drawing from the same impulse that prompted Quakers, Shakers, Puritans, Mormons, Adventists, and dozens of other sects to flee persecution and seek their own Promised Land in America—American spirituality is wilder, weirder, and ultimately more subversive than many of the traditions it sprang from. “The American mode of self-knowledge is essentially Hermetic not Christian,” Bloom explains. “Initiation in American spiritual rebirth commences a process in which we become ‘healed original and pure’ Anthropos. Rebirth is emphatically not a repetition of physical birth, but a bursting into a new plane of existence previously unattained.”

Bloom’s assertion, that scratch the surface of American Christianity and you’ll find a magical mystical body of initiatory knowledge, isn’t widely shared. That’s in large part because religion in America is either embraced by true believers who take it entirely at face value or dismissed by nonbelievers who deny there’s anything there to notice. “Gnosis [or direct experience of reality],” Bloom asserts, “has been domesticated in America for two centuries now, so we have the paradox of a Gnostic Nation that does not know it knows!” [emphasis added]. A Gnostic nation that does not know it knows. We have literally forgotten the tools we forged to help ourselves remember. A bitter irony, but also a chance to redeem it.

Picking ourselves up, and doing it all again. Dancing to forget. Singing to remember. While much of this tradition is steeped in the idiom of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as Harold Bloom reminds us, there’s a secret hidden within that secret too. The Arcana Americana is a living hermetical and heretical tradition. It rejects the doctrine of Original Sin—that we are forever cast out East of Eden to suffer and atone. In the place of guilty prostration, the Arcana Americana defiantly claims a second act, a transfiguration based upon the innate perfectibility of humankind. Anthropos, Bloom calls it. HomeGrown Humans, if we prefer something more accessible.

In the 1870s and ’80s, the Peyote Church spread rapidly from its origins in Northern Mexico to Indian reservations across the western United States. Its ceremonies included all-night rituals of song, dance, prayer, and repeated consumption of the psychoactive buttons of the peyote cactus. Anglo politicians grew deeply concerned by the rise of the “Peyote Cult” and, fearing Indian rebellions, outlawed its use. A decade later, Comanche chief Quanah Parker stood up to testify in front of the Oklahoma legislature on whether that prohibition should be repealed or upheld.

“The White Man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus,” Parker explained, “but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.”

As Michael Pollan mentions in How to Change Your Mind, there’s a profound difference between truly transformative entheogens—literally “a substance that engenders the sacred”—like peyote, and the “placebo sacraments of the Catholic eucharist.”

Talking “about Jesus” or any other deity is a third-person he/she/it kind of conversation. There’s Us (the subject) talking about Them (the object). Arm’s length. Relatively abstract. The realm of academics and scholastics counting angels on pinheads.

Alternately, there’s a second-person experience of the divine—what philosopher Martin Buber memorably called the I-Thou relationship. That’s the talking to Jesus that Quanah Parker championed. This is most typically expressed in direct supplicative prayer: “Dear God, please help me/give me/spare me/save me.” It’s definitely more intimate than abstract third-person discussion.

Finally, if we enter the rarefied world of mystics like Saint Francis of Assisi in Christianity, Maimonides in Judaism, Rumi in Islam, Padmasambhava in Buddhism, and Ramakrishna in Hinduism (to name only a handful), we see the grammar collapse. It moves from I-Thou relationship into a straight mystico-uni...

“Without somehow destroying me in the process,” American theologian Frederick Buechner wondered, “how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”

“Every culture has found such chemical means of transcendence, and at some point the use of such intoxicants becomes institutionalized at a magical or sacramental level,” NYU neuroscientist Oliver Sacks says. “The sacramental use of psychoactive plant substances has a long history and continues to the present day in various shamanic and religious rites around the world . . . some people can reach transcendent states through meditation or similar trance-inducing techniques, or through prayer and spiritual exercises. But drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand. These shortcuts are possible because certain chemicals can directly stimulate many complex brain functions.” That neurological stimulation, that “transcendence on demand” kicks down the walls of third-person speculation and gets us into second- and first-person communion.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a psychologist before he entered the monastery, described his experience. “It’s like climbing all day in the fog and then suddenly, briefly seeing the mountain peak for the first time. There are no shortcuts to the awakened attitude, and it takes daily work and effort. But the drug gives you a vision, a glimpse of what you are seeking.”

As much as I’ve had my world turned inside out and backward, and felt utterly transformed by entheogenic experiences, a large percentage of my personality structure remains humblingly intact.

Old-timey mystics used to call that the “Dark Night of the Soul”—the hair ball period after you’ve seen the light, and then had it unceremoniously whisked away. It’s always darkest (and coldest) just before the dawn. Sometimes, that next sunrise takes a lot longer to arrive than we hoped. Which begs the broader question: How transformative can entheogens, or “sacred substances,” really be? And are we using them right? This is a real issue. Arguably, it is the issue when it comes to appropriate use of psychedelic substances. Can we ever, as scholar Huston Smith once mused, “transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?”

It’s the Pareto principle gone wrong. If the first 20 percent of my experience of cathartic healing delivers 80 percent of the whizbang insights and breakthroughs, I am going to rationally conclude, “Holy shit! This is the most game-changing thing ever. I need to clear the decks and dedicate my life to this transformative practice—at this rate, I’ll be enlightened in no time!”

facing the disappointing reality that the remaining 80 percent of our time, money, and effort will be dedicated to gleaning only 20 percent more growth and integration. And that can take a lot of frustrated searching to figure out. The principle applies to ecstatic techniques of any stripe—psychedelics, group work, breath work, body work, tantra, music: succumb to the irrational exuberance of your initial hits of healing, and you can lose yourself. We can become addicted to the states without ever raising our stage.

Only in this case, we don’t get superbugs coming back to plague us, we get superegos. The very medicine intended to get rid of our selfish attachments can actually create even more virulent versions of the selves we were so desperate to transcend in the first place.

The technical term for this is what Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism”—often, our practices can become a source of pride that calcifies our egos even more.

This is the downside of Oliver Sacks’s observation that “drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand.” No need to practice Vipassana or pranayama for years. No prerequisite to cultivate ethics and right-livelihood ahead of time.

Fortunately, there are examples of how to properly integrate sacramental use into a culture—we just need to poke around a bit in the anthropological literature to find them.

Most religious traditions are inherently conservative. At some point in a distant past, a founder, and possibly an elect group of initiates, had access to revelation. After that, the veil closed, history turned, a priest class grew, and the rest of us had to settle for hand-me-downs and Just So stories.

Sure, there are third-person efforts to talk about the Divine, to add commentary like the Hebrew midrash, or the Church writings of Augustine. But direct second- or first-person I-Thou or I-I encounters with the Numinous? Generally frowned upon, or outright persecuted as heresy. Illumined certainty and orthodox authority have often been at odds. Few powerful priests have been willing to get upstaged by hair-on-fire mystics.

Freedom within limits. Innovation building upon tradition. Those are lessons we might draw from as we explore open-source sacraments for Meaning 3.0.

It’s entirely possible that 10 percent of the population should never touch them, especially those with adverse medical or family histories (as well as Dark Triad narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths).