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

by Jamie Wheal

In Maslow’s reading, we fear our own greatness as much as our failure for two reasons—the first is “How on earth will I keep this up?” and the second is “What will the neighbors think?”

Which brings us to the third and least-common version of cults in our survey. The ethical cult. Where traditional cults demanded subjugation of the self to the lineage, and culty cults demanded subjugation of the self to the guru, an ethical cult does neither. Instead, it seeks to enhance the sovereignty of the individual while increasing the intelligence of the collective.

If traditional cults were like taking your seat in an orchestra, and culty cults were like being in a marching band, ethical cults feel more like playing jazz. No sheet music or drum major to guide off. Just us, in the moment, listening for the pulse together.

Everybody cults, as David Foster Wallace reminds us. The only question is what kind of cult.

While there are nearly infinite ways to screw up ecstatic community-building, there are three common pitfalls to culty cults that have shown up over the ages: Grabbing the Ring, creating In/Out groups, and weaponizing Ecstasis and Catharsis.

Culty-Cult Checklist: What Not to Do Grabbing the One Ring of Power— Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Like in Lord of the Rings, don’t be the misguided warrior Boromir or the corrupt wizard Saruman, thinking you will bend the Ring, not that it will bend you. Be like Gandalf and the elven queen Galadriel—wise enough to know better. This one is nonnegotiable.

Here are the top three ways leaders get seduced into claiming more than they’ve earned. Mythologized Origin Story of the Founder—Carefully curated, often repeated tales of exceptional conditions surrounding birth, childhood, or early signs of prodigious talent/insight. Or a Dark Night of the Soul/ Road to Damascus conversion experience that uniquely positions this person to lead. In extreme cases, these are confirmed with self-appointed name change. (In the age of info marketers, this has morphed to include the “I had it all, the big house, fast cars, sexy li...

Absolutist Claims of Attainment—In the spiritual, intellectual, sexual, entrepreneurial, or artistic realms—typically reserved for the founder, occasionally extended to their inner circle. Once infallibility is claimed, all dissonance in relation to the founder must be either signs of supplicants’ blind spots and projections or deliberate “crazy wisdom” being offered to liberate the subject—never signs of the founder’s fallibility or humanity. This often extends beyond the blamelessness of the founder to the completeness and totality of their worldview, which is presumed to be comprehensive and supersedes all other modes of knowing. Two of the most prevalent expressions (often appearing together) are the one-two punch of absolute Enlight...

Ritualized Separation—Keeping the leader distinct from operational tasks, duties, and common mingling. Most often done by adoption of Eastern monastic traditions and terminology (like satsang, which means “sitting in the presence of an awakened guru”) but can also be accomplished by simple celebrity handling such as use of bouncers, greenrooms, and stage settings (which often include ornate seating, lily/lotus flower arrangements, altars, dressing in white or robes, or vestmen...

Creating In/Out Groups—The dynamic of creating an Us and a Them is central for dysfunctional cults to take root. It is how otherwise well-intentioned seekers can get pulled into a reality distortion field where they lose track of their bearings. Any practice, experience, or community that lifts people “up and away”—from their traditions, connections, and culture—rather than bringing them “down and am...

Messianic Purpose—The micro (of the community) is the macro (of the world) and the value of the work being done within the cloister has significance far beyon...

Specialized Language—Often culty cults use novel terms to describe or redefine everyday concepts or introduce pseudo-spiritual or pseudoscientific terms to convey legitimacy on otherwise unprovable truth claims.

“Quantum” used by non-physicists is a frequent catchall in the New Age scene.

Break with Past Precedent—Very rarely do cultic leaders situate themselves within a lineage that would subject them to accountability or critique larger than themselves by others older or wiser than themselves (living or dead). Instead, they tend to declare a “clean slate” even if their own development began within a school or tradition.

Weaponizing Peak Experience and Healing—Ecstasis and Catharsis create highly impressionable and susceptible states. While they can be used to enhance sovereignty, they can also rapidly erode it.

three consistent ways. Tightly Controlled Access to techniques of ecstasy—drugs, sex, breath work, music/dance, prayer, charismatic transmission, or sensory deprivation, as well as to methods of catharsis—body work, encounter-type group therapy sessions, personal inquiry, specialized diets, cleanses, etc.

An Emphasis on Regressive Practices That Value Feeling over Thinking and an inoculation against thinking/discernment as signs of ego, projection, or resistance that is to be trusted less than either the “truths” of catharsis/trauma release or the insights and framing of the leader.

Key Decisions and Commitments Encouraged or Forced While in Non-ordinary States—Whether testaments of love, allegiance, atonement, or payment, these groups use the softened boundaries and impaired judgment of euphoric peak states or cathartic release as times to secure emotional, social, or financial commitments.

Here are three additional edge cases that can dull our discernment and make it harder to know what we’re looking at until it’s too late. False Negatives: Many healthy communities of practice will check several of these boxes (especially those regarding strong in-group identity and ritualized access to peak states). Religions, martial arts lineages, fraternal/sororal organizations, and start-ups can display positive versions of these dynamics, without devolving into cultic behavior.

To differentiate between a healthy or pathological expression of these kinds of behaviors, an observer will need to exercise careful discernment and triangulate between all factors.

False Positives: Many cultlike communities will initially present with palpable energy, enthusiasm, and growth, precisely because they are harnessing many of the ecstatic and cathartic techniques described above.

Talented but Tainted: Often, especially after a scandal or community collapse, pundits will label the leader as a fraud. In this judgment, the guru was only pretending to be spiritual and really only wanted money, sex, fame, or power. Everyone who followed them was duped. While those kinds of low-level hucksters are abundant, as NXIVM’s Keith Ranière recently illustrates, at the higher levels of attainment, like Osho or Adi Da, it’s rarely that cut-and-dried.

The frequent use of altered states and regressive emotionality further disconnects followers from their common sense and discernment, making it harder to notice the decline.

These are all red flags and deal breakers. It is exceptionally rare for a leader to endorse any of those three behaviors—claims of infallibility, state-priming, and anti-intellectualism—and not have significant blind spots/ulterior motives. Even if not immediately apparent, they corrode the community over time.

attempt to revitalize the three functions filled by Meaning 1.0—inspiration, healing, and connection.

We then grafted them onto three values of Meaning 2.0—open-source, scalability, and anti-fragility. Because a viable Meaning 3.0 needs to work across cultures, we have deliberately stayed away from prescribing any specific doctrine.

The tools that we have considered—respiration, embodiment, sexuality, music, and substances—intentionally used, just help us do the human thing a little better. They give us more reliable and effective access to ecstasis, catharsis, and communitas.

While there are nearly infinite variations and permutations of how we worship, Meaning 1.0—organized religion—has tended to share five core elements. First, you need a Metaphysics.

Next, you need an Ethics.

Ethics are like the tail rotor on a helicopter—without them, we just spin in circles.

“There can be no society,” wrote Émile Durkheim, the founder of sociology, “which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and ideas which make its unity and personality.”

Over the long haul, you’ll also need Scriptures.

Last, but certainly not least, you need Deities.

“We are as gods,” Stewart Brand wrote on the first page of the Whole Earth Catalog, “and might as well get good at it.”

Tradition has it that Plato had a sign over the door of his academy that said, let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. That wasn’t because the philosopher was a big fan of Common Core educational standards. He was warning students, on the brink of contemplating the Mysteries, to make sure they were bringing logic and reason to the table.

So what essential tools for sense-making do we need to consider? The long answer is a rigorous education in logic, rhetoric, and hermeneutics, as Plato would have insisted.

The shorter answer is a sturdy triangle made up of Pascal’s wager, Occam’s razor, and Bayesian probability. Between them, they should ma...

Let’s start with Pascal’s wager. Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century French mathematician, famously figured that it was better to believe in God, on the off chance he was real, than to deny his existence and burn in hell for his doubts. Moral: At least conceive of the inconceivable, just in case it turns out to be true. As we enter the age of the Intertwingularity, everything from religious prophecies to global plots to existential collapse is on the table.

The second guideline comes from William of Ockham, the medieval Franciscan who gave us the maxim known as Occam’s razor. It boils down to “the simplest solution is usually the best.” Moral: Before galloping off into labyrinthine interpretations of our favorite conspiracy theory, late-night bender, or spiritual epiphany, consider the less exciting but more likely explanations first. “Extraordinary

The third pillar comes from Thomas Bayes, a sixteenth-century statistician who gave us Bayesian analysis. The world is chaotic, complex, and confusing, Bayes suggested, and the best you can do is track all the variables and update them as you get new information. Rather than gunning for false certainty, he encouraged provisional uncertainty. Moral: Don’t get out too far over your skis.

For the truly brave, willing to push off from the shore and voyage into the vastness of the unknown, there’s a final set of guidelines for navigating the metaphysical deep end. This takes the trio of Pascal, Occam, and Bayes, cross references it with the Infinite Game, and throws the whole thing into warp drive. These cautions and reminders draw on the collected experiences of Philip K. Dick, John Lilly, Robert Anton Wilson, Ken Kesey, and other modern psychonauts.

After encountering the vastness of the mysterium tremendum, the “Great Mystery,” Robert Anton Wilson maintains there are only two outcomes—you either go insane or become an agnostic. Think of this list that follows as a meta-metaphysics. It suggests an agnostic gnosticism—one that allows that a direct initiation into the nature of reality is not only possible but potentially desirable (that’s the gnostic part), but holds back from asserting any fixed or definitive statement of What It All Means (the agnostic part).

In the finite game the player plays within the rules. In the Infinite Game the player plays with the rules. —James Carse

So how do we deal with the partial truths of a nearly limitless number of perspectives? We have to bring our own logic and discernment along for the ride. If we’re architecting ethical culture, we need a way to make effective value judgments. Otherwise we risk slipping into a moral relativism that could rationalize almost anything.

Ecstatic experiences are inherently Antinomian. Literally in the Greek anti, “against”; nomos, “law.” That makes it tricky to establish rules for an inherently lawless domain. “There is such a sense of authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience,” Johns Hopkins’ Roland Griffiths writes, “that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.” The

The comforting solidity of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” doesn’t pair that well with the Antinomian certainty of direct experience or the Bayesian uncertainty of nothing is true, everything is permitted. Our current times have grown too complex for the black-and-white binaries of the Old Testament traditions.

we’ll need what developmental psychologists call “liberating structures”—rules that help but don’t constrain. And that means replacing the certainty of morals—clear, unambiguous, and binary—with the situational relevance of ethics, where it’s no longer the act that’s right or wrong, but it’s the relationship to the act that determines its value. As anthropologists joke, “It’s only wrong to eat people if you’re not a cannibal.”

The Ten Commandments Suggestions

Do the Obvious. There are entire industries devoted to personal growth, biohacking, and self-help. Most of them distract from the broader human project.

Don’t Do Stupid Shit. We’ve never had more access to such powerful, transformative technologies free of guidance or restrictions. In this Brave New World, we’re all operating on our own recognizance. So, no matter what, when playing with the Alchemist Cookbook, don’t accidentally end up in: a cult, a body bag, a jail cell, divorce court, rehab, or a mental institution.