Recapture the Rapture

A highly personal, richly informed and culturally wide-ranging meditation on the loss of meaning in our times and on pathways to rediscovering it. Gabor Mat, MD, author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction A neuroanthropologist maps out a revolutionary new practiceHedonic Engineeringthat combines the best of neuroscience and optimal psychology. Its an intensive program of breathing, movement, and sexuality that mends trauma, heightens inspiration and tightens connectionshelping us wake up, grow up, and show up for a world that needs us all. This is a book about a big idea. And the idea is this: Slowly over the past few decades, and now suddenly, all at once, were suffering from a collapse in Meaning. Fundamentalism and nihilism are filling that vacuum, with consequences that affect us all. In a world that needs us at our best, diseases of despair, tribalism, and disaster fatigue are leaving us at our worst. Its vital that we regain control of the stories were telling because they are shaping the future were creating. To do that, we have to remember our deepest inspiration, heal our pain and apathy, and connect to each other like never before. If we can do that, weve got a shot at solving the big problems we face. And if we cant? Well, the dustbin of history has swallowed civilizations older and fancier than ours. This book is divided into three parts. The first, Choose Your Own Apocalypse, takes a look at our current Meaning Crisis--where we are today, why its so hard to make sense of the world, what might be coming next, and what to do about it. It also makes a case that many of our efforts to cope, whether anxiety and denial, or tribalism and identity politics, are likely making things worse. The middle section, The Alchemist Cookbook, applies the creative firm IDEOs design thinking to the Meaning Crisis. This is where the book gets hands on--taking a look at the strongest evolutionary drivers that can bring about inspiration, healing, and connection. From breathing, to movement, sexuality, music, and substances--these are the everyday tools to help us wake up, grow up, and show up. AKA--how to blow yourself sky high with household materials. And the best part? Theyre accessible, by anyone anywhere, no middleman required. Transcendence democratized. The final third of the book, Ethical Cult Building, focuses on the tricky nature of putting these kinds of experiences into gear and into culturebecause, anytime in the past when weve figured out combinations of peak states and deep healing, weve almost always ended up with problematic culty communities. Playing with fire has left a lot of people burned. This section lays out a roadmap for sparking a thousand fires around the world--each one unique and tailored to the needs and values of its participants. Think of it as an open-source toolkit for building ethical culture. In Recapture the Rapture, were taking radical research out of the extremes and applying it to the mainstream--to the broader social problem of healing, believing, and belonging. Its providing answers to the questions we face: how to replace blind faith with direct experience, how to move from broken to whole, and how to cure isolation with connection. Said even more plainly, it shows us how to revitalize our bodies, boost our creativity, rekindle our relationships, and answer once and for all the questions of why we are here and what do we do now? In a world that needs the best of us from the rest of us, this is a book that shows us how to get it done.