Recapture the Rapture

Kindle Highlights

• At their heart, Rapture Ideologies share 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. 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.
• Call it the Techno-Utopian Rapture. And it follows that same four-stage framework exactly. 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 of the 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).
• “What experience and history teach us is this,” the German philosopher Georg Hegel warned, “peoples and governments have never learned anything from history.”
• But of all the possible shapes Vonnegut discovered, he noticed that the Cinderella Story (Down then Up, then Really Down then Really Up) was the most compelling.
• As Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson once put it, “We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
• As E. B. White, the author of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, once reflected, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
• Today, 80 percent of heroin addicts started out with a prescription for OxyContin.
• By 2015, the Pew Center posted a momentous survey—for the first time in history, the spiritual-but-not-religious, a.k.a. the “Nones,” had surpassed all other organized denominations to become not only the largest but the fastest-growing category of belief in the United States.
• relief, the World Health Organization reports that more people today kill themselves than die from all wars and natural disasters combined.
• “Plans,” said Winston Churchill, “are worthless. But planning is priceless.”
• When twenty-six people, who could all comfortably fit on a bus together (not that they’d ever ride one), own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world (nearly four billion people), you know we’re in a strange place.
• Wendell Berry, wrote that we have no choice but to “be joyful, though [we] have considered all the facts.”
• Left to our own devices, we regress under stress. Put simply, tribalism is destiny. Humanism is optional.
• after the Vandals sacked ancient Rome, it took until the Declaration of Independence for us to claw back to the same standard of living.
• If all of life on Earth was compressed into one twenty-four-hour day, anatomically modern man shows up at four seconds before midnight.
• Near the end of his life, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate coconspirator, admitted to a journalist at Harper’s: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana [and psychedelics] and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings. . . . Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
• Isolation, he concluded, is a “root cause and contributor to many of the epidemics sweeping the world today from alcohol and drug addiction to violence to depression and anxiety. . . . But, at the center of our loneliness is our innate desire to connect. 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.”
• Respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances, and music supporting inspiration, healing, and connection.
• enhances access to trance consciousness. Scientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have found that nasal breathing results in 15 to 30 percent better oxygenation than mouth breathing. And if you vibrate the nasal cavity while doing it, as didgeridu players do, it boosts nitric oxide by up to fifteen times.
• 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.
• Privation, pain, and suffering have an ancient, if counterintuitive, relationship to healing.
• Scientists have tried and failed to mimic our preference for spicy peppers in rats. Animals can be trained to self-harm to get a reward but only with positive reinforcement like food. “Generally, when an animal experiences something negative, it avoids it,” explains Paul Rozin, of the University of Pennsylvania. “If an animal took a roller coaster it would be scared, and it would never go again.”
• Burnt hemp seeds show up in Neolithic European caves and archaeologists have recently confirmed that the plant originated on the Tibetan Plateau as far back as twenty-eight million years ago.
• 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.
• The difference between a tonic and a toxin, the Renaissance alchemist Paracelsus reminds us, is always the dose.
• “It has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized,” says John Blacking, the anthropologist and author of How Musical Is Man? “The embodied nature of music, the indivisibility of movement and sound, characterizes music across cultures and across times.”
• “Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found [and] predate agriculture in the history of our species,”
• “We can say, conservatively, that there is no tangible evidence that language preceded music [emphasis added]. In fact, the physical evidence suggests the contrary.
• Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll weren’t the end of civilization, they were its beginning. For tens of thousands of years, they have served as the building blocks of culture—heightening group cohesion, honing our ability to communicate, and providing glimpses of the Sublime.
• “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.”
• A rite-of-passage initiation into adulthood with 3 grams of psilocybin, surrounded by elders, mentors, and peers, could fit here. This is the “Goldilocks dosage” perfected by Johns Hopkins to prompt insight and healing without excessive destabilization.
• 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?
• What if at each anniversary, they repeated the ritual? They could reconnect after twelve months of hope and heartache, and recommit to the year ahead. It might prevent the slow accretion of frustration, grief, and resentment that so often drive wedges between life partners. It would go a long way to keeping deep connections and intentions alive through the trials of life.
• 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. By all accounts, the compound 5-MeO-DMT provides the closest analogue to the white-light experience that many report in NDEs.
• When Parkinson’s patients are given too much L-Dopa, a synthetic substitute for dopamine, sweet-as-peaches Granny, once content to sit on the couch watching her “stories” on the TV, steals her kids’ credit cards and racks up thousands of dollars in gambling debt. Lower the dosage of L-Dopa, or stop the meds altogether, and old relatives come back to themselves, as if they’ve been in a dream.
• the neurotransmitter serotonin plummets during early courtship. It’s the hormone connected to both mood and appetite (and the primary system affected by antidepressants like Prozac and psychedelics like psilocybin). When it’s low, we become fixated on romantic and possessive thoughts and feel so lovesick we stop eating. Neurochemically, some researchers believe this infatuation closely mimics obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
• four to seven years later all those lusty attraction hormones shut down, like Hot Slots Grandma weaning off her L-Dopa gambling binge. The infatuation and fornication peter out, and we see a major uptick in affairs and divorces. That “seven-year itch” made famous by the Marilyn Monroe film turns out to be real. Hardwired into our genes, and right on schedule.
• Researchers have found that one of the surest ways to reduce that existential crisis and boost testosterone production in middle-aged men is having sex with a new younger partner.
• today, in the so-called developed world, half of all pregnancies are accidental,
• “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.”
• Animals ignore their sex drives until they are briefly consumed by them. But humans think and act on their impulse anytime, all the time.
• Most women, unless they’re on the Pill or using a fertility app, do not know for certain when they are in estrus—a simple fact of life that cows and baboons readily understand.
• “Women prefer more masculine partners for shorter-term sexual relationships. . . . More masculine traits, such as lower voice pitch and (to some extent) larger penis size are correlated with testosterone levels, which also may influence men’s mating goals and attractiveness.
• Women maintain visible and shapely breasts throughout their sexually reproductive lives, even when they’re not lactating. Virtually no other species does this. It impedes mobility and other survival functions but helps in mate selection. Primatologists call this a “false signal” because milk is produced by the underlying glandular tissue and not from breast fat. So bigger boobs don’t make for better mammas.
• “Women have enlarged breasts and buttocks, narrower waists, and a greater orgasmic capacity than other apes” [emphasis added].
• Some of the earliest figurines found in archaeological dig sites across Europe showcase this idealized female form. Forty thousand years ago, tits and ass were venerated.
• Given the choice, male monkeys would self-stimulate orgasm until exhaustion. Pass out. Wake up. Do it all over again. Predictable. But now proven.
• “We have strong evidence that sex (whether masturbation, watching adult films, or having sex with your partner) is an excellent method of improving mood, can be a primary method of coping, and can be engaged in on a regular basis,”
• lead to insight, integration, and bonding. “Enlightenment,” the old Buddhist saying goes, “is any path pursued to its completion!”
• 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.
• (go to www.recapturetherapture.com/tools for a full description of Hedonic Calendaring).
• The cult rarely disappears, so long as the social situation which brings it into being persists.”
• The original Latin word for “worship” is cultus.
• The year 2020 saw an exponential uptick in all four of these dynamics—Generational Amnesia, Ecstatic Technologies, Digital Influencers, and Rapture Ideologies—overlapping and amplifying each other.
• 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.
• I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. —William Blake
• So that’s it—the Ethical Culture Tool Kit for creating coherent communities. Metaphysics, Ethics, Sacraments, Scriptures, and Deities.
• Once you’ve figured out the Game, help turn as many NPCs (nonplayer characters) into Players and Players into Architects as you can.
• Mark Twain said, “If it’s your job to eat two frogs, eat the biggest one first.”
• If you want more flow, bliss, or grace in your life, tackle the gnarliest shit head-on. The Stoics were right about this one, the Obstacle is the Way.
• Wabi Sabi is a philosophy of the imperfection and impermanence of all things, and how life is made even more exquisite by that realization.
• historic civil rights movements have required 3.5 percent of a population to reach a tipping point of transformation. For current environmental and social justice movements that number has taken on almost mythical significance.
• Cantankerous poet and farmer Wendell Berry has a different suggestion. Expect the end of the world . . . Be joyful though you have considered all the facts . . . Practice resurrection.
• Rather than telling people what to believe, based on a distant and non-repeatable founder’s revelation, we can share the methods that prompt belief. And let everyone make up their own minds and hearts.
• In our survey of the Big Five techniques—respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances, and music—there’s a deceptively simple recipe that comes up time and again. Maximize endocannabinoids, endorphins, dopamine, nitric oxide, oxytocin, and serotonin. Increase vagal nerve tone and heart rate variability. Shift your brain into baseline alpha and theta activity, with dips into gamma or delta waves. Trigger a global reset of your brain stem with compounds such as nitrous oxide or ketamine or cranial-nerve stimulation (all these correlate with delta wave EEG induction). Load your nervous system with pulses of energy in the form of electrical current, magnetism, light, sound, pain, or orgasm. Align your spine, and engage your pelvis, limbs, and fascia for flexible movement and integration. Alter the ratios of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen in your bloodstream through deliberate organic or gas-assisted breathwork. Play high-fidelity polyrhythmic music that entrains you out of your default mode network and serves as a carrier wave of your subjective experience. Experience anamnesis—remember what it is that you forgot. Stay awake. Build stuff. Help out.
• Faced with weeks or months of tension we might even conclude, “You know, I’m just not sure we’re on the same journey anymore. I think I might be more committed to growth/spirituality/healing than you are.” And we might be. We really might be. Not every high school buddy or long-term spouse is drawn to the same things at the same pace. People absolutely do grow apart. Especially if we matched someone in an earlier phase of life we’ve now left behind, cracks can become gaps that become chasms.
• Humans are the existential mayflies of the universe. With life spans so brief that every moment matters to us, in a way that the immortals can never taste. We have prefrontal cortexes and opposable thumbs, and for a fleeting few decades we’re here to love and lose, to fight and fuck, to create and destroy, to yearn and grieve.