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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jamie Wheal
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May 22 - June 12, 2021
Not everyone wants to be—or should be—an elder. For the remaining 80 percent in the middle of the bell curve, what would a lifetime calendar of appropriate initiations look like? The three milestones of adolescence, marriage, and death are obvious candidates to consider.
The obvious next “placebo sacrament” we endure is the wedding. These days it’s often reduced to little more than photo ops, virtue signaling, and status displays. Little in the way of initiating a couple into hieros gamos—divine union—ever happens. What if, as part of the nuptials and in the company of a therapist, minister, or cherished members of the wedding party, the couple were to take 150 milligrams of MDMA (the MAPS therapeutic dosage) and share their deepest heartfelt hopes, fears, and commitments to the life they are about to cocreate?
Whether the physical death of an NDE, or the ego-death of a psychedelic therapy, it seems that getting a dry run at dying can meaningfully increase folks’ equanimity and grace when they ultimately have to face the real thing.
McKenna, though, saw a much grander role for those humble toadstools. He mused that complex linguistics sprang from the synaptic superconductivity of the psychedelic trip. It was, according to McKenna, the most likely candidate for how we went from grunting and pointing to poetry and song. And the truly heroic, blow-out-the-pipes shamanic adventure—or, as he so memorably put it, “Five grams in silent darkness”? The catalyst for nothing less than the prehistoric birth of awe and the origins of religion.
To refine our search for the causes of consciousness we need to ask what else could have provided the neurological boost to transform us from the ape who stands (Homo erectus) to the ape who knows (Homo sapiens)? A plausible alternate candidate to the Stoned Ape hypothesis would have to check three boxes: It would need to be strongly instinctive, feel powerfully rewarding, and enjoy widespread adoption. It would have to meaningfully shift physiology and psychology, and be able to do so repeatedly over time. In sum, the transformative substance or practice would need to be what psychologists
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Sex, for the overwhelming majority of animals, is violent, dangerous, and brief. There’s barely a lick of enjoyment for anyone involved.
“All these features of human sexuality—long-term sexual partnerships . . . private sex, concealed ovulation, extended female receptivity, sex for fun . . . constitute what we humans assume is normal sexuality,” Diamond explains. “But that proves to be a species-ist interpretation. By the standards of the world’s 4,300 other species of mammals, and even by the standards of our own closest relatives the great apes . . . we are the ones who are bizarre.”
Sure, dolphins and bonobos do sometimes, but they’re two of the most intelligent species on the planet. Their friskiness only strengthens the linkage between elective sexuality and complex cognition.
“What seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade,” Jia Tolentino recently acknowledged in The New Yorker, [is] the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face.”
“It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050.”
“Social media has supercharged the propensity to regard one’s personal identity as a potential source of profit—and, especially for young women, to regard one’s body this way, too,” she says. “For those born with assets—natural assets, capital assets, or both—it can seem sensible, even automatic, to think of your body the way that a McKinsey consultant would think about a corporation: identify underperforming sectors and remake them.”
“Within the relatively short period during which our ancestors and the ancestors of our great ape relatives have been evolving separately,” Diamond explains, “along with posture and brain size, sexuality completes the trinity of the decisive respects in which the ancestors of humans and great apes diverged. . . . Recreational sex . . . was as important for our development of fire, language, art, and writing as were our upright posture and large brains” [emphasis added].
We can complete the move from Homo sapiens (the ape who knows) to Homo ludens (the ape who plays).
“The ghostly imprint of sacred sex can still be discerned in every mainstream religion today,” psychologist Jenny Wade writes in Transcendent Sex. “It can’t be eradicated from the pool of human experience, and it keeps popping up randomly and irrepressibly.”
Hedonic Engineering—The human nervous system studying and improving itself: intelligence studying and improving intelligence. Why be depressed, dumb, and agitated when you can be happy, smart, and tranquil? —Robert Anton Wilson
Instead of spending years trying to imitate wise old Tibetan monks, for example, never sure what was true mysticism versus mere mannerism, we could actually learn what makes them tick from the inside out. If we did, we might notice that these contemplatives consistently display lower respiratory rates, more relaxed alpha-wave EEGs, and higher vagal nerve tone than your average citizen (among a host of other biological and psychological markers).
It also spares us the endless and largely frustrating search for accidental peak experiences. If we don’t know what got us there the last time, it’s much harder to re-create it the next time.
There’s no singular sweet spot to be in all the time, just like “balance” on a surfboard is an ever-shifting target. But an ability to fluidly adjust our state to match our task is invaluable. Range, rebound, and resilience are the name of this game.
Breath work works. So does body work.
Music. Substances. Sex. Pick any one of these paths, and they can lead to insight, integration, and bonding. “Enlightenment,” the old Buddhist saying goes, “is any path pursued to its completion!”
After assessing the six metrics tracking ecstasis, catharsis, and communitas, over the three months of the study, it was clear that Hedonic Engineering can be a potentially effective tool for healing, peak experience, and relational connection.
There can definitely be too much of a good thing. Most of us are familiar with the concepts of physical and psychological addiction. In the former, you need to increase the dosage of a given substance or behavior to get similar results, and when you remove the high, you have physical withdrawal symptoms, ranging from nausea to organ failure. In the latter, you might develop an emotional dependence or habituation, and when you remove the high you experience irritability, distractedness, or insomnia. Pushing all the buttons of our reward circuitry works better than most people imagine and can
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But there is a third variation we should also consider in the field of Hedonic Engineering—ontological addiction. That is where the information or insights gleaned from a given set of practices prove so compelling that they override normal checks and balances. As some of the participants in the study noted, “It was like looking at our life through a crystal ball” and “I was looking down on . . . this whole human experience from another dimension.” That’s novel, potent, and potentially all-consuming.
As Metcalfe’s law reminds us, the complexity of a network goes up with the square of the number of nodes in it. Managing tight bonds across large numbers of people is exponentially harder—literally.
Combining peak experiences and deep healing into powerful connections has a chequered history, though. In fact, we’re pretty bad at it. It’s a rare community centered on these ideals that doesn’t end up in one of three places: hedonization (the endless pursuit of pleasure), commodification (the selling of the sacred), or weaponization (the manipulation of these tools for personal or institutional gain).
we’re going to tackle the final and possibly hardest problem of all—creating communitas without the cults. If we can pull that off in a way that is truly open-source, scalable, and anti-fragile, then we have a chance to bring these broader ideas to the world.
“Of course the cargo never comes,” British anthropologist Peter Worsley noted. “The cults nonetheless live on. If the millennium does not arrive on schedule, then perhaps there is some failure in the magic, some error in the ritual. New breakaway groups organize around ‘purer’ faith and ritual. The cult rarely disappears, so long as the social situation which brings it into being persists.”
“Everybody worships,” David Foster Wallace acknowledged in his well-known essay “This Is Water.” “The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
The original Latin word for “worship” is cultus. A traditional cult, as scholars of religion would term it, means a sect of practitioners oriented around shared beliefs and rituals. The Hindu goddess Kali had her cult, as did the Greek god Dionysus. The Eleusinian Mysteries were a cult. The Native American Church was a cult. For over three centuries before Emperor Constantine made it the state religion of Rome, Christianity was also a cult.
These historic cults asked members to submit to tradition, and to the lineage of hierophants (literally, “ministers of the sacred”). The vulnerability of an initiate was grounded and bounded by those who had come before them.
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
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“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Lord Acton once observed. “Great men are almost always bad men.”
We seem to be backsliding down the slippery slope. We’re freshly vulnerable to cultic tendencies. There are a host of reasons for this, which could easily be the subject of an entire book. But here are four that seem to be reinforcing each other these days: Generational Amnesia: We always forget. If we didn’t we’d likely go mad with grief. Whether the pains of childbirth or the horrors of war, sometimes it’s better not to remember. “Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget,” anthropologist Wade Davis notes, “is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species.”
And like all children individuating from their parents, they tend to assume two things—the first, that nothing their parents did could be cool, relevant, or revelatory, and the second, that anything the kids have discovered is new and has never been done before. That’s leaving us with a wisdom gap, and we have an entire generation of echo-boomers putting it right in the same ditch, on the same hairpin turns that their parents did.
“He who knows only his own generation,” Churchill lamented, “remains forever a child.”
Techniques of Ecstasy: We’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating in this inventory. Never at any time in human history anywhere have so many had access to so much, with so few guidelines. The Age of Aquarius gets all the hype for being the era of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll experimentation, but really, that was a relatively small fringe population. It only looms so large in our collective imagination because the media loved to cover
Digital Influencer Culture: In the past, if you wanted to become an authority in a given field, you had to apprentice to a lineage. If you were a scholar you had to devote yourself to earning a PhD. If you were a writer, you had to work your way up to the journals of record. True also for martial arts, yoga, or meditation. Pick your tradition, find your teacher, submit to the practice, and maybe, just maybe, if you proved yourself out, year after year, at some point you’d get the nod and be given permission to assume the mantle of teacher yourself.
Rapture Ideologies: On top of all that—things have been getting super weird lately. For all the reasons we’ve discussed so far—the collapse in authority, global systemic crises, and tangled mythologies—it’s increasingly difficult to tell what’s around the bend. The seductive pull of Rapture ideologies beckons.
Fear, Fight, Follow, F*ck It’s a standard trope of cult-busting exposés. The narrator always asks the question, “But how could such a group of successful, intelligent, accomplished people fall for such a scam?” It was true for the varsity quarterbacks and homecoming queens of the Manson family, it was true for the heiresses and movie stars of the recent sex-slave group NXIVM.
We’re tribal primates wired to seek the silverback among us.
Like freshly hatched ducklings mistaking a barnyard pig for their mother, a “born again” human is susceptible to getting their wires crossed and following the wrong leader. We can’t think straight or see straight when we feel all funny inside.
Beneath the surface of our emotions, Barrett argues, we have a second layer, known as interoception. It’s literally what we sense in our guts. Rather than having dozens of different emotions, at the interoceptive level things are simple. There are two core axes our experience maps to: positive to negative and active to passive. All of our interoception ends up in one of four boxes.
If you feel negative but passive in this situation, you come to fear the teacher, and then possibly flee. They are bigger than you and more powerful and you’re not 100 percent sure—but the best bet seems to be to run. Get as far away from their reality distortion field as you possibly can.
In rarer situations, if you feel sufficiently threatened, or emboldened by a crowd, you might decide to challenge the leader, to fight them. Pitchforks, torches, crosses (or canceling) ensue. The only thing to do in this case is eradicate the one who makes you feel this uncomfortable.
those are four foundational interoceptive responses to being in the presence of an avatar—real or imagined. We want to follow them, fuck them, fear them, or fight them. These patterns are so deeply entrenched that they account for nearly every outcome of transformational movements across history.
And it doesn’t matter if the leader is a false front or the Real Deal. Our primate wiring calls the shots. From Jesus to Joan of Arc. From Manson to the Moonies. From Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. We’ve seen every permutation of this passion play. From the pedestal to the pit. None of them pencil out.
there is a fifth option, a middle path that is less common but essential for building a scalable Meaning 3.0. When an exceptional person, a true Promethean, switches on powerfully enough to pass that spark to others, what if, instead of following, fucking, fearing, or fighting them, we stayed dead center at the intersection of our interoception—feeling all of it ourselves?
The concept of our psychological “shadow,” i.e., those disowned or repressed parts of ourselves that are too dark to admit, is a well-known working concept in psychology. But the eminent twentieth-century Jungian Robert Johnson coined the term “golden shadow” to describe something else. Our golden shadow refers not to the dark parts we have a hard time owning up to but to the bright parts we are afraid to own. “The gold is related to our higher calling,” Johnson writes, “and this can be hard to accept.”
Abraham Maslow called this denial of our own power the Jonah complex.
