Recapture the Rapture

Recapture the Rapture

Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind

Jamie Wheal

Introduction:

Slowly over the past century, and now suddenly, all at once, we’re suffering a collapse in Meaning.

…traditional system Meaning 1.0 and it offered salvation to the elect. Those who believed were saved. Those who didn’t weren’t. Harsh but fair.

For the past few hundred years, we’ve been trying a different experiment—one based not on salvation but inclusion. That was the praise of global liberalism—the idea that markets, democracy, and civil rights would bring us into a world where everyone…was entitled to a fear shot at the good life

We can call this modern experiment Meaning 2.0 and it offered inclusion to the masses.

Promising in theory, portal in practice.

We are finding ourselves in the grip of Rapture Ideologies.

Rapture Idealogies share four key beliefs:

-the world as we know it is broken and unstable.

-there is a point in the near future where everything is going to change.

-on the other side of that inflection point, everyone we value will be saved/redeemed.

-so let’s get there as fast as possible, without much concern for the world we’re leaving behind.

It’s vital we regain control of the stories we’re telling because they are shaping the future we’re creating.

Techno-Utopian Rapture

Four-stage framework

-The world as we know it is doomed (not because of sin this time, but because of overconsumption).

-There’s an inflection point coming soon (geopolitical/ecosystemic collapse, not the coming Four Horsemen).

-On the Other Side, our people will be looked after (the Singularity/Mars Colonies for the best and brightest—Atlas Shrugged in space).

-So let’s prepare for that eventuality as fast as possible and never mind the collateral damage (build space stations and luxury bunkers rather than solve for global crises like food, water, energy, or climate).

A huge number of good-hearted, hardworking, live-and-let-live humans are having their fates decided by a passionately intense minority dedicated to capital “R” Rapture ideologies.

PART 1 Choose Your Own Apocalypse

We’re going to have to account for all the places we’ve traded courage for comfort, dedication for distractions and inspiration for information.

Chapter 1 The Centre Cannot Hold

Exponential education…Exponential biology…Exponential transportation…Exponential data…Exponential economics…something critical was missing—and that something was exponential meaning.

“We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”—E.O. Wilson

Chapter 2 Stop Making Sense

eschaton

Noun: the final event in the divine plan; the end of the world.

eschatothesia

Noun: a feeling of some huge event in the near future we are approaching: the end of an aeon, a marker in time after which nothing will be the same.

In ancient Greek, apocalypsis means “the unveiling or revealing.”

Understanding the dynamics of unity and dissent is essential if we stand a chance of recapturing the Rapture and finding functionals outcomes for everyone.

the Semmelweis reflex—the idea that we habitually and often violently reject new evidence or new knowledge because it runs so counter to our preexisting articles of faith—has become a standby on the list of common cognitive biases.

Right when we need to be at our best, we’re at our worst.

Culture is upstream of politics…biology sits upstream of them both.

Bret Weinstein…”there are really two ways in which cooperation evolves. The first one is very ancient and is based on genetic relatedness…The other kind of cooperation is based on various kinds of reciprocity and it is much newer and much more fragile.”

As often as not, biology beats psychology.

Left to our own devices, we regress under stress. Put simply, tribalism is destiny. Humanism is optional.

The Dark Triad of personality types—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Interestingly, the centrists—those people who held pro-social values but also respected the choices of others—did not show any correlation with the Authoritarian Dark Triad. But both the radical left and the alt-right did. That’s the basic contrast. Omni-Considerate win-win, versus self-interested win-lose.

James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. In it, he described most of human history as consisting of finite games, i.e., discrete contests with clear winners and losers. These would include war and conquest, but also transitional business, sexual negotiations, and national politics. Anything with a one up/one down outcome. According to Carse, there was another game, the Infinite Game—which, instead of having winners and losers, creates conditions where the purpose isn’t to end the game victorious. The purpose is to tune that game see very on can keep playing it indefinitely.

Change comes hard fought, or not at all.

What’s better—supply side economics a la John Keynes, or libertarian free markets a la Milton Friedman? Safety nets or bootstraps to build a society? Big sticks or carrots to preserve international order? Federal or states’ rights to guide the governed? Investing in education or employment to empower a citizenry? Separation or integration of church and state? Multicultural melting pot or national identity? Revolution or evolution?

Chapter 3 We Are the World

The question becomes less and less about where we might run and more and more about where we must stand.

Chapter 4 Meaning 3.0

We got the vote, the fridge, and the smartphone, but we forgot what it was all for. That has played a large part in the rise of diseases of despair. Fundamentalism on one hand and nihilism on the other. Neither is especially helpful. So the question for us is what Meaning 3.0 might look like. Can we architect culture that balances the salvation of traditional religion with the inclusion of liberalism? Can we do it not by top-down fiat but rather by bottom-up mobilization? And is truly inclusive salvation even a thing we can hope for?

It’s not about Vishnu, or Jesus, or Buddha, either. What you believe appears to be far less important than that you believe.

“If God did not exists, it would be necessary to invent him.” Voltaire

Design firm IDEO. 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 is what this book is about—bringing a Human-Centered Design process to the challenge of Meaning. If Part One has been about deeply understanding our need for Exponential Meaning, Part Two is all about prototyping possible solutions. Part Three will take those insights and explore ways to implement these ideas in the larger world.

If Meaning 3.0 stands a chance of helping our current crisis, 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.

Any cultural movement that threatens to upset the existing status quo is typically squashed by those looking to maintain business as usual. The counter to this predictable suppression of transformational movements is simple. Widely share recipes that enhance individual and communal sovereignty, using ingredients that are easily accessible. Distribute the human-centered design tool kit far and wide, so it cannot be censored or suppressed. In other words, make it open source and scalable. Make these tools a perpetual part of the commons. Share the cheat codes to the Infinite Game. Democratize transcendence. Seed a revolution, don’t lead a revolution.

Once we have designed 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 to human flourishing. Or put another way, inspiration, healing and connection. The ancient Greeks called those 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, and show up.

Studies show that experience 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. Packs of macaque monkeys have been observed overlooking food, fighting, and fornicating to gaze at an especially gorgeous sunset over the savannah. People who experience reliable access to peak states report having greater overall life satisfaction than those who don’t. [This is evidence for the necessity of a spiritual life. Invite the Hold Grail into your life. Develop a map for how to find reverence and peak states]

To recap: A 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 war for hearts and minds, we should be paying much more attention to our bodies and brains.

The evolutionary imperatives of our bodies are the longest lever we have to try and move the world.

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. It not only “soothes the savage beast”; it shapes our physiology, sense of connectivity, and capacity for awe.

Taboos, after all, don’t arise unless there is something powerful at stake. Virtually all societies strictly channel access to “techniques of ecstasy,” to borrow Mircea Eliade’s memorable phrase, into approved forms. Sex for procreation but not for recreation. Intoxication for stress relief but not for epiphany. Music to reinforce Apollonian order (like army marches and church hymns) but not for Dionysian revels (like Elvis and the Grateful Dead).

To engineer Ecstasis without the Crave (of addiction to altered states), prompt Catharsis without the Cringe (of indulgent self-help), and create Communitas without the Cult (of unreliable leaders and followers).

PART II The Alchemist Cookbook

Chapter 5 Respiration

Nasal breathing results in 15 to 30 percent better oxygenation than mouth breathing. And if you vibrate the nasal cavity while doing it, as didjeridu players do, it boosts nitric oxide by up to fifteen percent. Nitric Oxide is a powerful molecule that crosses the blood-brain barrier and takes us from vigilant and stressed into calmer, more resourceful states. The transition from waking consciousness to peak states is triggered by a flush of nitric oxide through the nervous system.

Most recently, doctors at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control have found that what makes didgeridu playing so healthy might even help with acute respiratory viruses like COVID. “Our results demonstrated that [nitric oxide] specifically inhibits the replication cycle of SARS CoV, most probably during the early steps of infection, suggesting that the production of nitric oxide…results in an antiviral effect.”

Sitting around a campfire at the foot of a sacred site like Uluru, that aboriginal elder was able to play themselves into a trance and enter Dreamtime. In that mythic space, out of regular time, elders connected with the sacred song lines of their lineage, and commanded with their ancestors “born out of their own Eternity.” And while there’s profound impact from set and setting, culture and context, their access to Dreamtime was underpinned by something as simple as an unusual circular breathing patter, vibration of the sinus cavity, and the overproduction of a key neurotransmitter.

Breath training boils down to three things: oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Varying the rate, depth, and rhythm of our breaths changes the ratios of the three gases that make up our atmosphere. In turn this affects how our bodies and brains perform and how our hearts and minds feel. That’s pretty much it.

“static apnea” score—a fancy term for holding your breath.

The more we can familiarize ourselves with the edges of our physiology, the more control we have at the edges of our psychology.

Holotropic breath work (literally “to move toward wholeness”)

Pulmonauts (literally “voyagers of breath”)

Nitrous soothes nerves and eases pain but also gives rise to experiences stranger—and potentially more therapeutically useful—than most Schedule I substances.

What we are searching for in this book: a way to harness the peak experience of lowercase “rapture”, without veering into certainty and dogma.

Chapter 6 Embodiment

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.—Jeremy Bentham

Hypofrontality, where activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex decreases (and with it, the executive function of the conscious self)… “When that area of the brain gets down-regulated,” Sagarin told The Atlantic, “we can lose the distinction between ourselves and the universe.” That’s the anatomical explanation—the most complex parts of our brains shut down and we experience that as relief from distressing thoughts and memories. But there’s also a chemical element that comes with it—a flooding of norepinephrine, cortisol, endorphins, dopamine, and anandamide. They share considerable overlap, Sagarin notes, “with the euphoric and dissociative experience of endurance runners, [mountaineers], meditators, and individuals under hypnosis.”

As far as we know, humans are the only animal wired up this way. Pain is a uniquely human indulgence.

We appear to be unique in the animal kingdom in discovering you can hot-wire pain to experience pleasure and even healing.

The endocannabinoid system (or ECS) is the name for that entire physiological network. It turns out to be the largest signaling system in the body and plays a central role in regulating blood sugar, hormones, pain, reward, heart rate, digestion, metabolism, and bone growth. It protects against inflammation and serves as the communication system between the brain and all vital organs. It also appears to serve a central role in healthy child development, supporting suckling and bonding between mothers and infants, and allowing painful memories to be released. It even helps heal traumatic brain injuries.

Richard Friedman, a psychopharmacologist at Cornell University, has confirmed that ECS heals our minds and not just our bodies.

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.”

Once we strip off our clothing and even lop off our arms and legs, we are, after all, little more than prefrontal cortexes connected to spinal cords connected to erogenous zones.

From our brain stem down to our root, we are wired for wholeness and even transcendence.

Chapter 7 Music

There are ten levels of prayer. Above them all is song.—Hasidic saying

That feeling of connection to others through the power of rhythm and song is, according to ethnomusicologists, even older than language itself. “Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found [and] predate agriculture in the history of our species,” Levitin writes. “We can say, conservatively, that there is no tangible evidence that language preceded music. In fact, the physical evidence suggests the contrary. Music is no doubt older than the fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute, because flutes were unlikely the first instruments.”

Chapter 8 Sacraments

Chapter 9 Sex, Part 1

“Social media has supercharge 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 underperformance sectors and remake them.”

As a species, we are already far more sexualized than any of our nearest relatives.

Concealed fertility, abundant recreational sex, permanent female breasts, frequent female orgasm, and large penises occur nowhere else in the animal kingdom. We are so different, in fact, that any accounting of our rapid acceleration into Homo sapiens has to consider our divergent sexuality as a prime candidate fueling that change.

…”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.”

Reward circuitry…Over time, those altered, more expansive and connected experiences became a permanent part of our thinking and being. Norepinephrine energizing us and sharpening our focus. Dopamine rewarding our explorations and new discoveries. Endorphins easing our aches and providing brief relief from the grin of life. Oxytocin bonding us to our lovers and offspring. Slower brain waves allowing subconscious thinking and inspiration. Our altered states became altered traits, one orgasm at a time.

We can transform the suffering and confusion that our sexuality has often caused. All of that imprinting, all of that relentless drive to procreate can be repurposed. Rather than dancing like puppets on the strings of indifferent evolution, we can united those strings and begin to stand on our own two feet.

We can complete the move from Homo sapiens (the ape who knows) to Homo ludens (the ape who plays).

Map our what hedonic engineering—a pleasurable path of healing, inspiration, and connection—might look like.

Chapter 10 Sex, Part II

Tantrika—a carrier of psychosexual initiation…

Padmasambhava…also known as Guru Rinpoche…himself acknowledged the power of Yeshe’s attainment. “The basis for realizing enlightenment is in a human body, male or female…But if she develops the mind bent on enlightenment the woman’s body is better.” Yeshe became Padmasambhava’s consort and teacher, bringing him to god consciousness and teaching him how to fly on her magic carpet.

The legend of Yeshe Tsogyal embodies the relationship between sex, suffering, and consciousness. On the one hand, she, like many women before and after her, was a victim of sexual violence. But on the other, she was able to master her body and mind to such a degree that she could not only withstand assault but could transform her assailants. She was a dakini—a woman who mastered the erotic and the divine.

Prolonged exposure to the shifted states that come from sexual arousal may well have nudged us toward expanded awareness. And as Yeshe’s story suggests, that expanded awareness might even hold the key to healing trauma and full awakening. The path to transcendence can begin in the most immanent place of all—our bodies.

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

Our ecstatic reward circuity maps one to one with our sexual arousal network. “Sexual urges,” a Kinsey Institute researcher explained recently, “are built own the basic brain architecture that underlies all emotions and motivated behaviors, from anger to joy.”

“You know, from our research mapping patients’ state in MDMA therapy, the closest analogue we can find, with those high serotonin, oxytocin, and prolactin levels, along with the feelings of safety, connection, and openness, is the postorgasmic state.”—Rick Doblin, founder of MAPS

“The biggest misconception about sex is that using sex to feel better is unhealthy,” Prause explains. “This view is widely promoted even by therapists. They are quick to shame patients who, for example, masturbate after a tough day at work, as having ‘poor coping.’ Relatedly, partners often shame one another for seeking sexual activity for a health purpose like managing stress…Shaming the use of sex for coping is an extremely harmful and regressive attitude not different than religious ‘sex only for recreation’ wrapped in a new banner of ‘health.’”

Prause is looking to measure the health benefits of orgasm. Ultimately, her goal is to validate orgasm-as-prescription like a pharmaceutical, for a spectrum of conditions ranging from sleeplessness to anxiety and depression.

Simple ‘no frills’ stimulation of a woman’s clitoris…is potent enough to deliver “substantial mystical experience” comparable to those substances. In fact, in a head-to-head matchup between the maximum dose of psilocybin that the Hopkins team administered and the orgasm protocol, simple sexual stimulation prompted more mystical states by over 6 percent.

This has meaningful implications for the rest of us. Mystical states, arguably one of the essential yearnings of humans throughout history, and now proven to have a strong correlation with well-being, healing, and existential equanimity, are attainable through one of the most accessible, inexpensive, low-tech methodologies available. No tacking the deserts of Sonora to find a toad to lick, no traipsing through the Himalayas looking for a sadhu to follow, just the simple act that brought us all here in the first place. Practiced purposefully, with an intent not to procreate but to integrate.

A breakthrough experience of awe, ineffability, and oneness through the accidental and intuitive exploration of their own bodies.

When it comes down to it, the psychotechnologies of mind control and alchemy are nearly identical.

The simple idea that you can use sexuality, substances, music, dance and awe to reformat consciousness is radical. [Holy Grail top-down causation]

Chapter 11 An Immodest Proposal

Catalog the biggest levers in our bodies and brains that affect our experience—from the neurological to the endocrine, cardiac, pulmonary, kinetic, and psychological.

Rather than waiting to accidentally become “enlightened” or a Six Sigma Blackbelt or whatever superlative we’re shooting for, why not adjust the settings of our bodies and brains first, and then see how life looks and feels like from there?

…these contemplatives consistently display lower respiratory rates, more relaxed alpha-wave EEG’s, and higher vagal nerve tone than your average citizen (among a host of other biological and psychological markers). You could then take a regular person, put them into that same physical state, and see if they feel a little more resilient and compassionate. It’s a pretty straightforward approach to human development that swaps out psychological rumination for physiological recalibration.

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!”

The longest levers to shift our neurophysiology, and with it our psychology, lie at the intersection of our ecstatic and erotic neural circuitry, and they are freely available to all of us. That’s critical if we want to develop tools that are widely available around the world, regardless of privilege and access.

Hedonic engineering. A deliberate set of neurophysiological practices designed to combine peak experiences in service of healing, integration, and connection. [Transcending Paradigms Collective]

The recipe for a Sexual Yoga of Becoming Practices boils down to this:

-Supersaturate your body and brain with endorphins, dopamine, nitric oxide, oxytocin, and serotonin.

-Optimize your endocannabinoid system and boost vagal nerve tone.

-Entrain your brain out of beta-wave executive functioning and into alpha and theta activity, with intentional spikes into gamma or deep dives into delta waves.

-Reset your brain stem with cranial-nerve stimulation and/or selective exposure to molecules like nitrous oxide or ketamine.

-Pulse energy, in the form of direct or alternating current, magnetism, light, sound waves, pain, or orgasm through your nervous system.

-Engage and align spine, pelvis, limbs and soft tissues for a full range of motion and proprioceptive integration and embodiment.

-Breathe in deliberate patterns to up regulate or down regulate your nervous system by altering the ratios of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen.

-Play powerful music that syncopates and discombobulates your conscious thinking, and ideally inspires with lyrics that can serve as poetry/living scripture.

-Take the ride. Don’t flinch (or give in to astonishment). Remember what you forgot. Come home. Do your homework.

-Experience anamnesis—remember what it is that you forgot.

-Stay awake. Build stuff. Help out.

Communitas…overall happiness and relational closeness

Catharsis…reduction in physical stress and residual psychological trauma

Ecstasis…increase in daily peak states and meaningfully stronger mystical experiences than they had ever had.

Under the right conditions, Hedonic Engineering can outperform many more intensive or expensive interventions—including talk therapy and clinical psychedelic therapy.

When you intentionally hot-wire the full suite of evolutionary drivers, you may trigger stronger results than you intended. The only difference between a delightful flow state and a destructive compulsion is its positive or negative impact on one’s life. Put bluntly, the only difference between an alchemist and an addict is the scoreboard.

PART III Ethical Cult Building

Chapter 12 Everybody Worships

“Everybody workshops…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.”—David Foster Wallace

Interception. 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 interception ends up in one of four boxes. You can feel actively positive—like joy and excitement. You can feel actively negative—like anger or fight. You can feel passively positive—like calm or contentment. And you can feel passively negative—like melancholy or depression. On top of these visceral states, we assign words and thoughts, plots and characters, conjuring more elaborate explanations of what’s going on for us and who’s to praise or blame for the way we feel. But at our root level, it’s always one of those four states.

So those 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 do deeply entrenched that they account for nearly every outcome of transformational movements across history.

Chapter 12 The Ethical Cult(ure) Toolbox

What are the essential ingredients for Meaning 3.0? What is the tool kit for building ethical culture?

First, you need a Metaphysics…reliable ways to make sense of the Ineffable.

Next, you need an Ethics.

Then, you need Sacraments. If you don’t have reliable techniques of ecstasy to deliver the sacred (however you define it) to your congregants, you will lack both the revelatory insights and potent bonding that fuel a spiritual community. “There can be no society,” wrote Emile 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.”

You’ll also need Scriptures. We live through our tradition’s stories.

You need Deities. If there isn’t some higher power to aspire to, we’re literally left to our own self-interest.

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

Cheat Codes for the Infinite Game:

-The Game has an infinite number of levels in an infinite number of dimensions

-The purpose of the Game is to remember you are playing it (anamnesis).

-The more levels of the Game you remember you’re playing, the more fun (and consequential) the Game becomes.

-Higher levels of the Game bleed through into 3D: They often show up as coincidences, synchronicities, or absurdity. This is a “known issue” best taken as a reminder that the Game is afoot (and held loosely).

-The 3D level is the access point to all the other levels of the Game. If you die at the 3D level of the Game, it is Game Over (unless or until proven otherwise). So no matter what, don’t die in 3D!

-Don’t say anything, or think anything, that you don’t want o become more true.

-Once you’ve figured out the Game, help turn as many NPC’s (nonplayer characters) into Players and Players into Architects as you can.

-Stay awake. Build stuff. Help out.

“The answer is never the answer,” Ken Kesey once said. “What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

How do we strike the balance between liberation and structure in our relationship to the central experience of the Ineffable?

Chapter 14 Team Omega

The more we connect, the more we can, and even must preserve our differences. Mystical pluralism. Transcendental humanism. Anything more decisive risks a decline into fascism over time.

The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hans echoes this idea when we wrote, “The next Buddha will be a Sangha,” meaning that the next Great Awakening would not be led by an individual avatar (a Buddha or a Jesus). Instead it would take the form of a dedicated community—the Sangha. This version of our salvation is collective and inclusive.

The split between those committed to the global-centric Infinite Game and the ethnocentric Finite Game. The Infinite Game—which recognizes everyone’s right to play and seeks to extend the Game to more and more players—is a practical expression of what Teilhard calls “Universal Love.” Those who refuse to take that step and remain separate will be advocates of the Finite Game, who seek to win while others lie, and keep the spoils of the game for themselves.

Self-Transcendence…reflects a return to simple service of others.

The ancient Greeks defined two very different types of time. Chronos is linear, discrete clock time. Marching inexorably from past to present to future. A horizontal move through space. We’re all overly acquainted with Chronos these days—never enough of it, life ripping by in the rearview mirror Frantic and bored at the same time. And no matter how successful or regretful we feel, never able to get any of it back. The ancients also expressed the notion of Kairos, or sacred time, the Deep Now. It includes one seamless and sanctified moment. Kairos is life back in the Garden—outside linear time and its relentless march toward entropy and decay. Kairos is the vertical “axis mundi”—the World Pole on which our chromo-logical crossbeam hangs.

That’s Kairos. To second-guess it, or to want more of it once you’ve tasted it, borders on ungrateful.

If we are lucky enough to find or fumble our way to Kairos, the only thing to do is to drop to our knees and weep with gratitude. There’s no second-guessing redemption.

Chapter 15 Pondering the Yonder

He who does not know the secret “die and become” will remain forever a stranger on this earth.—Goethe

We come to that unreserved trust—in ourselves, in each other, and in the universe—somatically. We feel it in our hearts and bones, or not at all.

Four explanations for where the information in peak states comes from…

Explanation One: The Unwelt Effect

Aldo’s Huxley called the “reducing valve of consciousness.” Our consciousness mind, for example, processes information at about 120 bits per second. Our retina processes up to 11 million bits. In a non-ordinary state, we expand that reducing valve and our umwelt—or the portion of reality the we can perceive expands with it. Hopped-up neurochemistry, hyperconnected neuroanatomy, and optimized neuroelectricity let us pick up on more of what’s swirling past us every second anyway. It may seem supernatural, but really it’s just more data. For a strict materialist, this is the leanest, most Occam’s razor-ish explanation. “The universe is full of magic things,” Eden Phillpotts wrote, “patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper!” All peak states do, then, sharpen our sense enough to perceive a little more of that magic.

Explanation Two: The Ancestor Effect

…suggestive evidence that there’s some form of legacy memory—both biological and psychological—that we inherit from our families.

…methylation, i.e., the ability of genes to turn on or off depending on real-world conditions…

Explanation Three: The Starstuff

We share about 97 percent of the crucial building blocks of life—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur—with the rest of the galaxy.

DNA..has been around for 3 billion years…DNA, responsible for the programming of all life, can be both encoded and decoded.

In heightened states of consciousness, where our nervous systems are primed to perceive patterns and access information that isn’t normally accessible through waking awareness, is it possible that we can somehow “read” the information in our genetic DNA? And if we can, however clumsily or intuitively, decode that data, what story would it have to tell us?

In the beginning, I am. Before the the moon and the stars, I am. Before Abraham (or Instagram) I AM.

Only in this thought experiment, the grand “I Am” is us. Encoded in our bodies, decoded by our brains, we find that we are literally the Alpha and Omega—we’ve been here all along. The raw materials of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, the phosphates and sugars of the DNA strand make up all of life, and all of us. And the anamnesis—the forgetting of the forgetting that so often accompanies glimpses of Kairos—could be remembering of that simple fact.

Explanation Four: The Information Layer

…the notion of a non-local source…a realm of reality beyond what our umwelt or five senses can perceive.

Plato called it the Realm of Ideal Forms.

Akashic field…If and when we access that field we gain entry to a world of incredibly dense, non-local data.

For most of the modern era, pondering the Information Layer—whether the aether, or the noosphere, or something with “quantum” in front of its name—was a dodgy career prospect. Scientists risked almost certain ridicule and marginalization for even considering that there was a There there, beyond thing air.

The notion that the information doesn’t come from anywhere, but that it is present everywhere, is one of the more intriguing hypotheses in contemporary physics. While most scientists hold the the universe is made up of combinations of energy and matter, or even time space, others hold that at its simplest expression, the universe is information.

Ecstasis inspires us, but also gives us the blueprint to heal. Catharsis mends us, and leaves us bette able to integrate the insights we receive. Communitas connects us to each other in celebration and support. [Buddha, Dharma, Sangha]

If we fixate on one element at the expense of the others, we fall out of balance. If we deny the sacred, the mundane will crush us. If we deny the mundane, the sacred will burn us. But once we accept both we die to our lives of separation.

It really is the Agony and the Ecstasy. Both. Forever.

We’re never fully fixed. We’re never totally broken.

Conclusion: The Four Horsemen Cometh

If we don’t practice transcending our survival programming, we’ll flinch.

We have the chance to move beyond a life of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.

We are presented with the chance to step off the hamster wheel of Chronos and willingly step up to the cross of Kairos.