How to Survive the Meaning Crisis - Recapture the Rapture Book Notes
Book Rating: 5 / 5
Who should read it:
The inventors of tomorrow’s religions.
Leaders who don’t want to succumb to tribalism.
Workshop facilitators who use embodiment, breathwork, music, or substances.
Buy Recapture the Rapture by Jamie Wheal.
High-Level Thoughts
A few months ago, I was in a state of panicked anxiety after listening to a podcast about ecological overshoot. 48 hours later, I watched Jamie Wheal’s brilliant Rebel Wisdom talk and immediately started to calm down. I went on to devour his 400-page book in three weeks.
We’re living in crazy times of narrative collapse, climate crisis, rising fascism, and record low institutional trust. This book gave me the resolution of a Spartan warrior to fight the crises of our time.
I believe we can use the power of ecstatic experiences, story-telling, and human connection to get through this.
Note: I’ve blended direct quotes, paraphrases, and my own notes.
Book Summary and Notes
According to Kurt Vonnegut, you can trace any story by the rise and fall of the main character’s situation. Vonnegut noticed that the shape of the Cinderella story was particularly compelling.
It starts Down goes Up, then Really Down then Really Up.
Click above to watch Vonnegut explain his theory in 4 minutes
Today – when crazy geopolitics, extreme weather, famine, refugees, war, superviruses, cyberterrorism, and existential despair clog our news feeds, and all defy simple solutions, we seem to be in the Really Really Down part of humanity’s story. The smartest and best-informed among us are freaked out, and the rest of us flip-flop between anxiety and pretending it’s not really happening.
But the next part of our Cinderella story is completely up for grabs. We have the chance to write the next chapter.
The Collapse of Meaning
We’re living in a time of narrative collapse – professor John Vervaeke calls this the meaning crisis. But if we look back, we can divide humanity’s history of meaning-making into different eras:
Meaning 1.0: When we found faith and comfort in organized religion. Religions offered (and still offer) salvation to the believers.
Meaning 2.0: Classical liberalism and secularism. The idea was that markets, democracy, and civil rights would bring us into a world where everyone is entitled to a fair shot at the good life.
But both religion and classical liberalism are collapsing around us. They continue to promise a beautiful future, but they’re losing believers by the day. And as Meaning 1.0 and Meaning 2.0 have collapsed, Rapture Ideologies have rushed in to fill the vacuum in meaning.
A Rapture Ideology shares four key beliefs:
The world as we know it is broken and unsavable.
There is a point in the near future where everything is going to change.
My people will be saved/redeemed on the other side of the inflection point.
… so let’s get there as fast as possible, without much concern for the world we’re leaving behind.
Some examples of these rapture ideologies are:
Mars Colonization will save us.
My Doomsday Shelter will save us.
Artificial Intelligence will save us.
Jesus will come back and save us.
The Singularity will save us.
QAnon will save us.
The 5D Awakening will save us.
Bitcoin will save us.
These are different skins of the same program… The great big turning point is just around the corner! For instance, according to the Pew Research Foundation, 58 percent of American evangelicals believe that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is going to occur before 2050.
As Jamie Wheal says, “Consider that for a minute, save for retirement? No point. Transitioning off fossil fuels? Why bother? Saving endangered species? Why play God when he’s coming back soon enough?”
Low trust breeds extremism
On the whole, we don’t really trust our secular institutions anymore. Trust in “Meaning 2.0” is eroding in many areas. Many people don’t trust:
Banks – Numerous scandals. Funded terrorism. 2008 collapse. Etc…
Silicon Valley – Social media is horrible for our self esteem. Worse for democracy.
Catholic Church – Pedophile scandals and cover ups.
News & Media – Biased coverage. Constantly sowing division and stoking tribalism.
Doctors – Over-prescribe pharmaceuticals. Neglect the power of nutrition, Placebo, and “alternative therapies.”
As things fall apart, we’re seeing a migration to the extremes. On one hand, you have fundamentalists digging deeper into their ideologies. Meanwhile, the nihilists are numbing themselves out one doom scroll at a time. And the people stuck in the middle – the moderate, the curious, and the spiritual but not religious “nones” – have no particular place to go.
We’re fighting each other when we need to cooperate
As Jamie writes, “We’re not really stepping up to the occasion to solve the challenges of our time. Given the biblical flood we’re in for, you’d think we’d be filling sandbags and setting up bucket brigades. But no – the sheer enormity of everything – climate, geopolitics, social unrest – is short-circuiting both our cognition and our emotions. Instead of cooperating as a species, we’re raging against each other in culture wars.”
Both the far left and the alt-right want to control the narrative around the Western legacy and it’s relation to evolutionary biology in order to advance their goals.
The left wants to tear down the Western canon because they see it as the origin of contemporary oppression. They want to censor biology in case contemporary findings on race or gender become weaponized. And to be fair – popular narratives of the past four hundred years are rife with “scientific” arguments propping up despicable things like the institution of slavery, chemical castration of homosexuals, and wage gaps between men and women.
“On the flip-side, the alt-right doesn’t want to tear down the West,” writes Jamie. “They foolishly glorify it. Powering up their fever-dream Aryan patriarchy one semi-ironic Reddit post at a time. #becuzaristotle and #becuzscience.”
Both sides are missing the most critical insight of all: a careful study of biology highlights just how fragile, rare, and precious the humanist experiment really is.
Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstien notes that homo sapiens has evolved two forms of cooperation. The first, ancient form is based on genetic relatedness: we work together with people with similar genes as us. “The other kind of cooperation is based on various forms of reciprocity,” he says. “It is much newer and much more fragile [starting 10,000 years ago]... When reciprocity-based cooperation breaks down we default to gene-based cooperation… backing people against the wall who have a genetic basis for cooperation is very dangerous because history tells us… they may turn into a genocidal menace.”
Please don’t break civilization
Oxytocin is indeed the love drug, but few realize that this isn’t the whole story. Studies show that boosting oxytocin increases envy. It increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of outsiders. Harvard immunologist Katherine Wu says, “Oxytocin [also plays] a role in ethnocentrism, increasing our love for people in our already-established groups and making those unlike us seem more foreign.”
“We regress under stress,” writes Jamie Wheal. “Put simply, tribalism is destiny. Humanism is optional. On either side of politics, anyone seeking to smash the System–no matter how righteous or justified– is, at a profoundly important and structural level, on the same team. Alt-right neo-Nazis actually have more in common with far-left radicals than either would be willing to admit. A new study in the journal Heliyon found that people on both the far left and the far right scored statistically higher in the Dark Triad of personality types: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.”
If we tear apart now, when we should be urgently uniting, if we dig in and say, “I refuse to cooperate with those not like me until I get my due,” then we increase the likelihood that we all get hurt. Badly.
“On either side of politics, anyone seeking to smash the System–no matter how righteous or justified– is, at a profoundly important and structural level, on the same team.”
How to Design Meaning 3.0
Meaning 1.0 was all about salvation for the faithful. Religion has always promised inspiration, healing and connection – but it did so while raising up a select group of followers who deserved such benefits, while punishing the nonbelievers.
On the contrary, Meaning 2.0 has been about the equity and inclusion. We invented democracy, the bill of rights, and the classically liberal ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, the West has fallen way short of meeting these ideals for women, indigenous populations, and people of color – but there has still been an upgrade in the operating system. We’re no longer in religious monarchies.
But it’s important to note that when the West started replacing religious guidance with science and liberalism – we lost a lot, too.
When Nietzche declared that “God is dead,” he meant that we achieved inclusion – but at the expense of salvation. “We got the vote, the fridge, and the smartphone, but we forgot what it was all for,” writes Jamie Wheal. We lost our moral foundation and were left with a God-shaped hole in our hearts. Not altogether a bad thing, but the burden of creating our own sense of rightness, wrongness, truth and sacredness is… heavy. “If God did not exist,” Voltaire observed, “it would be necessary to invent him.”
The New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins initially celebrated the collapse of religion, but we’ve lost many of the pro-social elements that Faith used to convey. Religion as a cultural meme has survived for tens of thousands of years because it conveys an adaptive advantage. According to the Pew Research Foundation, believers are generally wealthier, healthier, and happier than non-believers. It might be time to reinvent religion: this is Meaning 3.0.
Meaning 3.0 needs to be broadly relevant and locally adaptive. To do that, it should borrow three design criteria from scientific Modernism – Open Source, Scalability, and Anti-fragility.
History is littered with the stories of joyful ecstatic experiments violently suppressed by the powers that be. Someone discovers a direct route to liberation that threatens to cut out the established middlemen, and they’re rarely welcomed with open arms. Try to storm heaven and there’s almost certainly hell to pay.
The whirling dervishes of Sufism have been persecuted for centuries for their refusal to bow to external authority. Tantric Shaivist sects in India regularly ran afoul of conservative leaders of more mainline denominations. Shakers, Quakers, and Mormons all had to flee their homelands to pursue their more direct and experiential faith.
To counter this predictable suppression of transformational movements is simple. Widely share recipes that enhance individual and communal sovereignty, using ingredients that are easily accessible. Democratize transcendence.
The Meaning 3.0 Flywheel
The Sacred Design Lab at Harvard Divinity School distills faith 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 three ecstasis, catharsis, and communitas. They are how we wake up, grow up, and show up.
Let’s take them one at a time.
Inspiration serves as an essential counterweight to the crushing “life’s a bitch and then you die” monotony of existence. Packs of macaque monkeys have been observed overlooking food, fighting, and fucking 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.
“And it’s not just fleeting inspiration that happens in these peak states,” writes Jamie. Insight, pattern recognition, and lateral connections all spike when the neurophysiology of ecstasis comes online. We find ourselves less distracted, more attentive, and more inventive in these states.
Ecstasis, also called flow, can come from meditation, dancing, or snowboarding down a mountain. The practice is different, but the inner experience is similar.
Healing – the second nutrient we all need. “The world breaks everyone,” said Hemingway, “and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.” We all suffer micro-PTSD nearly all the time. Having a way to digest our grief, rather than choke on it, is essential. As Bessel Van Der Kolk writes in his brilliant book, the body really does keep the score.
Whether it’s the absolution of Catholic confession, the ritual forgiveness of Jewish Yom Kippur, or the cathartic suffering of a Lakota Sun Dance ceremony, religion has always provided ways for us to mend and atone.
Connection–religions connect people to a community. In his book Together, the former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy writes “we have evolved to participate in community, to forge lasting bonds with others, to help one another, and to share life experiences. We are, simply, better together.”
The technical term for this kind of togetherness–the profound and healing kind–is what anthropologist Victor Turner calls communitas. It means a merging with the collective that transcends our personal separation. The founder of Daybreaker, Radha Agrawal, calls it collective joy. These group experiences happen when individual decision-making merges with a collective intelligence. That experience is up to three times as rewarding as an isolated peak experience.
The technologies of transcendence
Let’s get practical. Five of the most potent and accessible physical drivers to shape consciousness and culture and help us build Meaning 3.0 are:
Respiration – Breathwork can shift our physical and psychological states.
Embodiment – Our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems play a huge role in our health, wellbeing, and stress resilience.
Sexuality – If we don’t procreate we die. So there are tons of neurochemical drivers baked into our systems to ensure we do.
Substances – Humans, and most other animals, routinely seek to shift states as part of their learning, growing, and mending.
Music – Music can amplify any of the other experiences. From ancient chants to cathedrals to chain gangs to concerts, music has accompanied us on the journey of human civilization.
Virtually all societies strictly channel access to these “techniques of ecstasy” into approved forms. Sex for procreation but not recreation. Intoxication for stress release but not epiphany. Music to reinforce order (like army marches and church hymns) but not for revelry (like Elvis and the Grateful Dead).
No civilization worth its salt hasn’t tightly prescribed access to these five forces. Otherwise, nothing remotely “civilized” would ever get done. So how do we build a framework where we don’t misuse these ecstatic technologies? Our responses will roughly align with one of three personality types: the Hedonist, the Conformist, and the Purist.
The Hedonist is generally all in on optimizing their ecstatic experiences. Their challenge is knowing when to stop. “Beware unearned wisdom,” Carl Jung once cautioned. Infidelity and addiction are their Achilles’ heels. Brakes (to slow their pursuits) are their missing link.
The Purist tends to prefer the “earned wisdom” of meditation, yoga, and prayer to the more volatile approaches. Wheatgrass and elixirs are their substances of choice. Their catchphrase is “my body is my temple.” Pride is their Achilles’ heel. Gas (to accelerate their growth) is their missing link.
The Conformist tends to defer to established authority regarding which ecstatic practices to follow. They might willingly have their child on a methamphetamine for ADD, but consider psychedelic therapy frightening. Compliance is their Achilles’ heel. Steering (out of the ruts of consensus opinion) is their missing link.
Notice which persona feels most true for you. The Hedonist values pursuing the fullest range of experience possible. The Purist values sanctity of mind and body. The Conformist values expert advice and evidence. If we can integrate these three orientations, we’ll be stronger and more effective technicians of the sacred.
We can remember who we are through sublime peak experience, we can mend our broken parts through cathartic healing, and we can choose to connect–as couples, communities and citizens.
That’s the challenge before us: to build a Meaning 3.0 that can engender Ecstasis without addiction, Catharsis without indulgent self-help, and Communitas without the cultiness. Coming together like this might just give us a chance to brave the difficult road ahead with conviction and courage – together.
