“Recapture the Rapture” from Rebel Wisdom
“Recapture the Rapture”
Source: Rebel Wisdom + Jamie Wheal (Listen: 1 hr, 11 min)
Contributor: Selena Garcia
“WE’RE IN A PERIOD OF EXPONENTIAL CHANGE, BUT NO ONE HAS ARTICULATED A FRAMEWORK FOR EXPONENTIAL MEANING FOR US TO HELP MAKE SENSE OF ALL THIS AND STEER IT.” — JAMIE WHEAL
If you're a Sensemaker with an existential itch to scratch, this is for you.
DESCRIPTION: “In the face of multiple existential threats, and a pervasive crisis of meaning, how can we reconnect to our deepest purpose and what techniques and practices can help us reboot?”
Jamie Wheal recently launched his new book, Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost its Mind. Here, he comes together with Rebel Wisdom to touch on so many things, including but not limited to:
The structure beneath all things.
Getting out of your own way.
Reconnecting to healing, inspiration, compassion, and connection.
How lived experiences can have a positive impact.
Drugs and alcohol
Integration
Ethics
The human condition/spending our life trying to escape it.
Wounding and release
Forever finding "it" and forgetting "it.”
Fetishizing
Death/rebirth experiences.
How do we teach and train as an intense sport?
The American songbook.
Theology, metaphysics, neuroanthropology, and more make up Wheal’s potent punch. We’re reminded that the keys to our cage are also the keys to the kingdom, and while things today are getting worse, they’re also getting better.
You’ll need earmuffs if listening around kids, but there are no ads, and Jamie flows as if thinking aloud. Overall, the podcast feels really good. Each heavy topic is buoyed by thought-provoking questions, so you’ll feel a spark of inspiration about your life and the unique direction you’re headed in.
“The question here is what narratives can work for us that steer us in a direction that doesn't lead to basically sociopathic denial of our collective responsibility for each other and for this home planet of ours?" — Jamie Wheal
(3:29) Jamie: "We're in a period of exponential change, but no one has articulated a framework for exponential meaning for us to help make sense of all this and steer it. E.O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist's pithy summation where he says, ‘We have paleolithic emotions. Basically our neurophysiology and even root psychology is 50,000 years old out of date. We've got medieval institutions, and we've got God-like technology.’ How to make sense of all that?"
(5:50) Jamie: "We all experience the rudderlessness. We experience the schizophrenia confusion, and we're succumbing to diseases of despair. We're succumbing to individual and collective traumas—micro and macro PTSD. So for me, it's kind of a pillar to post play. Which is if we can help humans individually and at scale reclaim their inspiration—so I remember what I forgot, I reaffirm my reason for being in this wacky ass existential experience of being alive on this earth briefly. Kind of Ernest Becker, the kind of existential dilemma and at the same time discharge trauma and ideally come from as integrated and resourceful a place as possible and reaffirm connection to others, starting with pairs. Starting with life partners, expanding slowly to small groups and slightly larger groups. Is that possibly a way for us to live into and animate stories that serve us? And that serve us collectively through potentially periods of accelerating, and novel, and consequential change."
(16:37) Jamie: "The question here is what narratives can work for us that steer us in a direction that doesn't lead to basically sociopathic denial of our collective responsibility for each other and for this home planet of ours? And so there's a massive level of this stack which is all the practical stuff. All the hard decisions, all the politics, the social organizing, the ecological policies, economic… I don't know. There's a million levels to this that I have no concept of, but what I do believe is that there's some root hope in human nature if we can get out of our own way. And so if we can, again, reconnect to healing and inspiration and reconnect in higher trust compassionate connection that what we will choose to do from there can potentially have exponential positive impact…Without those things, we're stuffed. If people are traumatized and reactive, if we have forgotten any sense of any higher or nobler reason for being other than just red, and tooth and claw, dog eat dog survival. And if we break any sense of connectivity for our fellow humanity, then none of this can possibly happen.”
(23:23) Jamie: "To actually say, ‘Here's the full stack user manual for doing this human thing, and it doesn't actually premise or promise a happily ever after steady state.’ Back to we've got to avoid the allure of those rapture ideology that just says, ‘Look, healing, inspiration, connection, or catharsis like the wounding and release of it, extarsis, the peak experience, and communitas, a profound sense of connection.’ That's kind of the flywheel of this life of ours. We're forever finding it, forgetting it, getting the shit kicked out of us, picking ourselves up, leaning on our friends, or helping someone else out, doing it again, doing it again. This is the human experience, and so…”
LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST, HERE. (1 hr, 11 min)
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