Author: Jamie Wheal

Topics: Lifestyle design, Neuroscience, Theology, Societal systems

All information is attributed to the author. Except in the case where we may have misunderstood a concept and summarized incorrectly. These notes are only for reference and we always suggest reading from the original source.

Contents

Introduction: Doomsday Preppers

Part I: Choose Your Own Apocalypse

Chapter 1: The Centre Cannot Hold

Chapter 2: Stop Making Sense

Chapter 3: We Are the World

Chapter 4: Designing Meaning 3.0

Part II: The Alchemist Cookbook

Chapter 5: Respiration

Chapter 6: Embodiment

Chapter 7: Music

Chapter 8: Sacraments

Chapter 9: Sex, Part I

Chapter 10: Sex, Part II

Chapter 11: An Immodest Proposal

Part III: Ethical Cult Building

Intro

Chapter 12: Everybody Worships

Chapter 13: The Ethical Cult(ure) Toolbox

Chapter 14: Team Omega

Chapter 15: Pondering the Yonder

Conclusion: The Four Horsemen Cometh

Introduction: Doomsday Preppers

Our original sense of meaning, based on faith, is considered Meaning 1.0. It offered salvation to those who prescribed and not to those who didn’t. The last few hundred years were based on inclusion (Meaning 2.0), with the promise of global liberalism – the idea that markets, democracy, and civil rights would bring us into a world where everyone, not just the elect, were entitled to a fair shot at the good life. Unfortunately, all this brought was economic disparity, global crises, and environmental degradation. Accept the rules, play the game, and your turn will come. Due to the collapse of these meaning systems a vacuum has been created that has let in a host of beliefs that threaten civilization. We are now suffering from Rapture Ideologies:

1. The world as we know it is broken and unsavable
2. There is a point in the near future where everything is going to change
3. On the other side of that inflection point, everyone we value will be saved/redeemed.
4. So let’s get there as fast as possible, without much concern for the world we’re leaving behind.

At this point we desperately need to heal our pain and apathy, and connect to each other before the rapturists beliefs result in us going down with them.

The Mars space race, which has attracted the billionaires, has captured everyone’s attention and is consuming vast resources. This Rapture ideology has gotten them excited to chase an uninhabitable planet even though we have the chance to save the one we are already on. This techno-utopian-rapture has similar frameworks:

1. The world we know it is doomed (because of overconsumption rather than sin)
2. There’s an inflection point coming soon (geopolitical/ecosystem collapse, not from the four horsemen)
3. On the other side, our people will be looked after (the singularity/Mars colonies for the best and brightest-Atlas Shrugged in space).
4. 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).

Even though these people are directly saying we need to leave or die, we still tend to think of cool sci-fi futures rather than the near certain possibility that personally we’ll be left behind. There isn’t enough room on those rocket ships for all of us. Our belief that everything will work out sits between wishful thinking and helplessness.

Between hedge fund managers preparing to escape to NZ or Alaska, building bunkers, hoping their security force still listens to them, Elon escaping to Mars, Ray Kurzweil uploading his mind into a supercomputer, and Peter Thiel reversing aging, they are all trying to prepare for a digital future or doomsday that transcends the human condition. All knowing the possibility of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion is very real. For all their wealth and power, they believe we are far too gone.

If we don’t do something, the Rapturists will have their way and we’ll end up on a Mad Max exhausted planet, catching one of the last flights to space, or get swept up in a Middle Eastern war. However, nobody seems to be paying attention. We’ve ceded the airways to zealots and news cycles. Designer religions with sci-fi mixed with science, racketeering and psychobabble, is starting to spread already.

Part I: Choose Your Own Apocalypse

Chapter 1: The Centre Cannot Hold

We’ve traded courage for comfort, dedication for distraction, and inspiration for information. We often tell ourselves stories that reflect our favorites. Such as rags to riches and boy meets girl. Our favorite is the Cinderella story that starts down, goes up, goes crashing down, and rising up dramatically. Our story has gone from nasty-> to industrial revolution, and democratic revolutions, indoor plumbing, voting rights, vaccines, smartphones, etc.->the stroke of midnight where we are 100seconds until doomsday. The 2020 UN Climate Report gave us a decade to figure out the planet or face increasingly severe consequences. Geopolitics, extreme weather, famine, refugees, war, super viruses, cyberterrorism, and existential despair. The smartest and best informed are freaked out, with the rest of us flip flopping between anxious and pretending it isn’t happening. There is a chance for us to turn this around but it requires 100% commitment.

Jonathon Haidt says “A part of being human is believing in gods and worshipping and having a sense of the sacred. And I think we have a need, we have a hole in our heart… it needs to be filled by something-and if you leave it empty [people] don’t just feel an emptiness. A society that has no sense of the sacred is one in which you’ll have a lot of anomie, normlessness, loneliness, hopelessness.”

People who have stopped believing in a god have just considered themselves spiritual but not religious and have nowhere to go.

Chapter 2: Stop Making Sense

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

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.

Winston Churchill – “Plans, are worthless. But planning, is priceless.”

The left wants to tear down the Western canon because they see it as the seedbed of historic and contemporary oppression. They want to censure biology in case contemporary findings on race or gender become weaponized.

The alt-right agrees. But rather than fearing those defenses of traditionalist power, they’re cheering them. Trolling the libs, melting the minds of the snowflakes. Shoring up their fever-dream Aryan patriarchy one semi-ironic Reddit post at a time.

These two both miss the point, that a careful study of biology highlights how fragile, rare, and precious the humanist experiment really is.

Bret Weinstein – “There are really two ways in which cooperation evolve. 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 [10,000 ya]. When reciprocity breaks down, we go back to gene-based… ” this may create genocidal menaces. More often than not, biology beats psychology. So, we need to advocate for more inclusiveness, or the righting of societal wrongs, we need to pay attention to the foundation our lives are built on.

When people undergo sustained chronic stress due to loss of social status, economic hardships, and general dislocation (as is increasingly happening around the world), their serotonin levels get depleted. They’re more likely to behave vengefully. When it drops (involved in self-regulation) people become focused on immediate rewards, and they become impulsive and more aggressive. People took revenge on others even when it cost them personally.

In crowds or political rallies, serotonin and dopamine surge. The dopamine spike kills our hyper-altruism – or kindness to strangers.

Boosting oxytocin can increase envy. It increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups. It can even decrease cooperation. It also plays a role in ethnocentrism, increasing love for people in our already established cultural groups, making those unlike us seem more foreign.

Tribalism is the last level of social identification and belonging we are hard-coded to support. After genes and oxytocin bond us to the ones we love, and intensify our willingness to other, everyone else we aspire to is elective and not at all guaranteed. Left to our own devices, we regress under stress. Tribalism is destiny. Humanism is optional.

The dark triad of personality types: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Prosocial people who respect the choices of others (centrists) didn’t show these tendencies, but both the radical left and right did. The emerging set of mainstream political attitudes are being adopted by individuals with the Dark triad traits and entitlement. Yeats – “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” Radical people often want to demolish the system, so they’ll have a blank slate to start their own Utopia. But that’s naïve and dangerous. It’s much easier to break a few eggs than put humpty back together again.

We always look at sides rather than contextually. Supply side economics or libertarian free markets? Safety nets or bootstraps to build a just society? Big sticks or carrots to preserve national 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? All we know is that whenever we’ve paid oppression with oppression there has been bloodshed and when we met it with compassion, we’ve remade the world.

Chapter 3: We Are the World

Pollution and plastic has made it’s way to the highest and lowest points of our planet. Even buried at the North and South poles. It is mostly due to the jet and gulf stream. We’re on a rotating planet, and air and water circulate in strong and predictable currents.

Viral memes spread seemingly randomly across the world. Gangnam Style matched the flow of movement of the black plague after correcting for social distance versus physical distance.

“Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective… We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Racism seems to be a weaker bond than species-ism. But hoping for an alien invasion to spark global unity isn’t a viable strategy. For a species that seems to forever trip over our own sense of importance, a healthy dose of awe, wonder, and humility could be good for what ails us. If we can become more skillful in the exploration of our own minds, and of reality itself, we would invariably reframe our sense of our own significance in the grand scheme of things. “Engineers of inner space.”

Every time we listen to our amygdala alarm clock and find something that Sapolsky calls “salient” – meaning it might make us or break us – we get a strong squirt of dopamine. Even if the news is shitty, it feels perversely good to have found it. When we get too much dopamine we succumb to apophenia. A tendency to perceive patterns and meaning between otherwise unconnected events and facts. It shows up in conspiracy theorists and early onset schizophrenia.

Also, when we are separated from family and loved ones our oxytocin plummets, leaving us less trusting, more suspicious, and prone to paranoia.

“Aberrant interactions between dopaminergic reward systems, a dysfunctional amygdala, and the neurohormone oxytocin engender a neural milieu that improperly assigns emotional salience to environmental stimuli. This deficit in turn results in aberrant social cognition that may ultimately lead to misguided social responses, from withdrawal and isolation to suspicion and paranoia.”

Chapter 4: Designing Meaning 3.0

We’re in the age of philanthrocapitalism—where Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and others, after ruthlessly crushing competitors and exploiting offshore tax havens, are now redirecting their historic fortunes toward solving many of the problems they helped create. There are several reasons for why this won’t work:

1. It absolves us of reviving dysfunctional democratic responses. Our systems for addressing social needs are broken, but the solution is to fix them at the local level, not bypass them altogether.
2. Second, it’s a massively inefficient redistribution of capital. There’s an enormous amount of humanitarian and civil engineering that is not sexy at all, and may never catch the eye of a major donor.
3. Centralized decision making is no match for a thousand micro-decisions made on the ground.
4. The public feels uneasy about it too. Gate’s advocacy for vaccines made the public question his position giving advice as a nonelected official.

Without religion, the public is suffering. Even though it is an opiate for the masses, believers engaged in religious congregations are generally happier and more civically engaged than nonbelievers and the unengaged. If we don’t fill the god-hole, nihilism will. It seems if we want to ensure our survival as a species, we may need to reinvent religion.

We need a human centered design process to the challenge of Meaning. IDEO, an urban development company used the following to help poor and vulnerable populations:

1. Inspiration, you learn directly from the people you’re designing for as you come to deeply understand their needs.
2. Ideation, you’ll prototype possible solutions.
3. Implementation, you’ll bring your solution to life and eventually to market.

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 to make it as inclusive as possible:

1. Open Source: Rather than a one-fits-all approach, it should respect the vast diversity of values and beliefs across cultures and communities and be adaptable to regional conditions. It should be content neutral, i.e., nondogmatic and nondoctrinal – so everyone can fill the blanks themselves. Modifiable by anyone who has a specific problem they would like to solve. Can add layers of functionality. The overall code grows from grassroots efforts, not top-down release schedules.
2. Scalability: Needs to be cheap or free, as low-tech as possible and user friendly.
3. Anti-fragility: Gets better as things get worse. We need cultural solutions that are robust enough to cope and accepts challenges as a form of growth. A cultural hormesis.
4. We also need to be antifragile enough to deal with the predicament of getting squashed by those wanting to maintain the status quo. They won’t want a cultural uprising that disturbs their current way of life relying on game theory. To address this we can share human design toolkits that enhanced individual and communal sovereignty, using ingredients that are easily accessible. Also distribute it far and wide so it can’t be censored or suppressed (open source and scalable). Seed a revolution, don’t lead it. Share the cheat codes to the Infinite Game.
5. We also need ingredients from religion. These are Beyond, Becoming, and Belonging. Inspiration, healing, and connection. The Greeks called it ecstasis, catharsis, and communitas. How we wake up, grow up, and show up.

1. Inspiration serves as a counterweight to the crushing monotony of existence. A moment where it all makes sense, a chance to lay our burdens down and stand tall. A reason for being. Experiences of awe can alleviate stress, improve life satisfaction, decrease physical pain, and alleviate depression. Insight, pattern recognition, and lateral connections all spike when the neurophysiology of these experiences comes on line. Our inner critic goes quiet; norepinephrine, dopamine, and endocannabinoids sharpen our focus and help us draw conclusions we might not have seen before. Brain waves shift from agitated beta frequency to slower, more reflective alpha, theta, and delta states and bypass the normal gatekeepers of our mind. We find ourselves less distracted, more attentive, and more inventive in these states. Peak experiences and flow to cut through the noise and distraction.
2. Healing. Ernest Becker said, “Man is literally split in two. He has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.” Nearly 1/10 of us will be diagnosed with PTSD. The rest suffer micro-PTSD all the time. When we are in a highjacked state we are less perceptive, resilient, and resourceful. Hurt people hurt people. Religion provides ways of mending and atoning. Without that we suffer.
3. Connection to community. Social ties, camaraderie, and support are tied to wellbeing and longevity. We live a paradox being hyperconnected superficially while still isolated. From our families of origin, neighbors, and ourselves. Despite our progress with mental health, we are still ashamed to feel lonely. Isolation is a root cause to alcohol and drug addiction, to violence, to depression, and anxiety. We need communal bonding, where individual decision making merges with a collective intelligence. 3 times more rewarding than a peak experience.

These three requirements work like spokes on a wheel. Once you engage one, the other two follow. There is no sequence. This flywheel represents the benefits to quality of life that we lost through the death of religion.

So, a viable candidate for Meaning 3.0 will need to fulfill the prosocial 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 Antifragile.

The next part is dealing with our four most potent and accessible physical drivers to shape consciousness and culture and to help build Meaning 3.0 are:

1. 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.
2. Embodiment. The core regulators of our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system play an enormous role in our health, wellbeing, and stress resilience. They are the metronome of our physiology that sets the rhythm of our lived experiences.
3. 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.
4. Substances. We shift our states as part of learning, growing, and mending. A “fourth drive” – a desire to feel different, to achieve a rapid change in one’s state.
5. We can also add Music. It shapes our physiology, sense of connectivity, and capacity for awe.

Religions worth their weight in salt would restrict and channel these drivers to make sure the people were focused and got shit done. The response to restriction elicits one of three response:

1. The Hedonist, when confronted with the chance to optimize ecstatic experience, is generally all in. “Unearned wisdom.” Their challenge isn’t in trying new things, it’s getting them to stop. “If it feels good, do it.” Values the fullest experience.
2. The Purist, when presented with novel techniques of ecstasy, often shut down. They prefer “earned wisdom” through meditation, yoga, or prayer to being reckless. They tend to view volatile approaches with suspicion, considering them cheating or a shortcut. Values the sanctity of mind and body.
3. The Conformist, tend to defer to established authority – medical, legal, religious – to tell them what is within and beyond the pale. They would probably be taking prescription drugs but balk at weed or psychedelics. Values expert advice and evidence.

By putting these all together, we can remember who we are through sublime peak experience, we can mend when we’re broken through cathartic healing, and we can choose to connect – as couples, communities, and citizens. 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). That’s Meaning 3.0 worth living into.

Part II: The Alchemist Cookbook

Chapter 5: Respiration

Alpha wave state is an optimal neural state for learning. It is characterized by complete concentration, engagement, and losing track of linear time. “Ancestor Mind” can involve immersive visualization and extra-cognitive learning such as revealed knowledge in dreams and inherited knowledge in cellular memory. Conscious vibrations release a potent neurotransmitter that alleviates stress, prompts a shift in physiological states, and enhances access to trance consciousness.

Karolinska Institutet in Sweden found that nasal breathing results in 15-30% better oxygenation than mouth breathing. And if you vibrate the nasal cavity while doing it, like didgeridoo players, it boosts nitric oxide by up to 15 times. Nitric oxide is a powerful molecule that crosses the BBB and takes us from vigilant and stressed into calmer, more resourceful states. These little puffs of NO lead to endorphins and dopamine.

The transition from waking consciousness to peak states is triggered by a flush of NO through the nervous system. It works as a signaling molecule, sending info back and forth between parts of the brain that don’t normally communicate, dialing down stress responses and dialing up deep relaxation and connection. They call NO the “spirit” or catalyst of the peak experience.

The boost from playing the didgeridoo helped asthma and sleep apnea to reducing mental stress. As effective as silent meditation for decreasing self-perceived negative arousal, tiredness, and energy. It also acts as an antiviral response, inhibiting replication.

Breath training comes down to oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Varying the rate, depth, and rhythm of our breaths changes the ratios of the 3 gases that make up our atmosphere.

Holding breath at the top before gasping (Involuntary Breath Movement) is your static apnea score (average is 30-90sec). The unpleasant air hunger feeling is the buildup of CO2. Breathing out and holding is your CO2 tolerance score (20-40sec). A good indicator of VO2 max and aerobic fitness.

Air hunger can be trained. Navy seals do box breathing to deal with the CO2 build up (5sec-5sec-5sec-5sec). Then extend the timing. Once you get used to testing your range you can game the system by artificially lowering the amount of CO2 in the bloodstream. Take a big lungful of air, exhale forcefully, and repeat 50 times through pursed lips. You might tingle because hyperventilating has changed the blood to alkaline. You’ve also blown off a lot of CO2.

Next is to slow our oxygen burn. We can do that by dropping our heart rate. Vagal breathing, where we double the length of our exhales to our inhales, signals to our bodies that all is right with our world and engages our parasympathetic system. Ten second exhales, followed by two-second holds, followed by four second inhales work well. Andrew Huberman, has discovered that if you soften your gaze to the edge of your vision (letting your eyes drift to two and ten) and breathe through your nose while humming, you can get an even deeper relaxation response. And if you vigorously sniff in additional air on the final inhale, it can pop open your alveoli for more oxygenation. Practice this for 5 minutes and gently check your pulse. It should be 10-30% lower than resting. Free divers use it to consume less oxygen on dives. It is good for traffic and public speaking.

Holotropic techniques for O2, N2O, and CO2 control.

1. Acceleration: Energizing or upregulating our nervous system. Pursing lips, swinging arms and huffing and puffing.
2. Braking: De-stress or downregulate our nervous system. Slow, deep breaths before walking on stage or free diver’s vagal breathing.
3. Steering: Shifting consciousness from waking-state normal to a more meditative, contemplative, or shamanic experience. Kriya yogi alternating breaths out of each nostril while chanting a mantra, or transcendent breath work session.

Free diving breath holds checked all the boxes essential for flow state for him. Deep embodiment, High consequence, and Rich environment.

Nitrous oxide soothes nerves and eases pain but also gives rise to another experience… William James used to to overcome his depression and also to acquire insights, that seemed to slip from him once sobriety returned. His two major nitrous fueled contributions to academia were that direct experience is more valuable than religious dogma and that there is no singular and absolute truth-only a multitude of perspectives.

Nitrous oxide triggers three of the six neurochemicals central to almost all non-ordinary states of consciousness – norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, (anandamide, serotonin, and oxytocin). Its anxiolytic qualities come from bonding to dopamine and benzodiazepine receptors. Its analgesic, or pain relieving, comes from the endorphins or opioids it releases.

Nitric Oxide, NO, carries stress chemicals form the brain and serves as a vasodilator. Once in our lungs and brains, No and N2O behave similarly. In the brain, enzymes break N2O into NO.

When inhaling a 50:50 blend of nitroxygen, participants went from beta waves to delta waves. Double the amplitude of normal delta during sleep. Like backdoor lucid dreaming. It would start 6min in and last from 3-12min. Then the brain would adapt and normalize. Brown hypothesizes that the nitrous molecules bind to receptor sites in the thalamus and cortex to knock out arousal signals from deeper inside the brain, allowing a system reboot. Delta wave activity has also been shown in DMT and ketamine states.

Sleep researchers found that only during slow oscillation delta waves is the intracranial pressure low enough to allow cerebrospinal fluid to come in and wash the brain tissues of beta-amyloid plaque. Delta-waves are increasingly demonstrating the potential to heal our brains.

Warm up with box breathing to increase our CO2 tolerances and diaphragmatic control. Master the free diver’s vagal breathing to lower our heart rates (you can even throw an ice mask on your face if you want to induce the mammalian dive reflex). Blow off excess CO2 with Grof’s holotropic hyperventilating, supersaturate our red blood cells by pre-breathing pure oxygen, and then practice gas-assisted static apnea with a 70/30 nitrous oxide/oxygen blend, or a 30/70 carbon dioxide/oxygen blend.

Chapter 6: Embodiment

A bunch of 9/11 responders and firefighters had survivor’s guilt. To deal with that, they got into the BDSM scene. To receive a concerted beating and to allow their soul to release. Earning the right to be happy and alive again. Not an arousal thing or any sex involved. The people involved were less neurotic, more open, more conscientious, and more extroverted than the control group when studies were done to see where they fell on the big 5 personality trait test. They were less sensitive to rejection and reported a higher sense of wellbeing. During the BDSM sessions they reported hypofrontality, where activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex decreases (executive function of the conscious self). Allowing relief from previous distress during a disconnection from themselves and the universe. The brain also floods with norepinephrine, cortisol, endorphins, dopamine, and anandamide. Similar to the euphoric dissociative experience of the runners high. Ultramarathon runners, cross-fitters, vipassana meditators are all looking for this feeling. A lack of blood flow and neuronal signaling leading to an altered state of consciousness. Described as dreamy and pleasurable.

The endocannabinoid system: 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.

In a 1998 study involving soldiers with blunt force head trauma, researchers found that if medics could get cannabinoids into the bloodstream within four hours, they could meaningfully reduce the glutamate storm that the brain releases. ECB also direct stem cells to become brain cells and contribute towards recovery. However, cannabis swamps and overpowers the brain’s cannabinoid system and there is evidence that chronic use may not just relieve anxiety but interfere with learning and memory.

Humans with the cannabinoid mutation showed enhanced fear extinction and learned more efficiently how to be unafraid. Sexual assault victims and war veterans can’t do this well so the endocannabinoid system can help to soften these haunting memories.

The vagus nerve is responsible for vasomotor activity, certain reflex actions such as coughing, sneezing, swallowing, vomiting, shitting, and orgasm.

Chapter 7: Music

Queen were able to make the clap sound on “We Will Rock You” spread around the stereo, so that it felt like you were a part of a crowd. Creating the feeling of connection to others through the power of rhythm and song.

There’s no reason not to believe that music came before language. Music may have served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony-Levitin. Robin Dunbar believes that a few hundred thousand years ago, when humans began to make music, dance, and sing, they did it not just to connect with each other but to transcend themselves. When synchronized breathing, chanting, drumming, and dancing reached a peak, individuals likely entered a trance state. A trance dance restores the equilibrium in a bickering tribe.

DJs play around with tempo, bass, and timing to entrain their audience. The peak to peak transient timing is 8.2 hertz and the alpha wave state (focused) can be entrained between the 8-14hz range. A trance state (meditation, flow, etc.). The 50 most successful trance techno tracks are all 128bpm.

Cornel West insisted that “The question is being a hope. Having hope is still too detached, too spectatorial. You got to be a participant. You gotta be an agent. You keep on pushing.”

Chapter 8: Sacraments

The Pareto principle applies to ecstatic techniques of any stripe—psychedelics, group work, breath work, body work, tantra, music: succumb to the irrational exuberance of your initial hits of healing, and you can lose yourself. We can become addicted to the states without ever raising our stage.

Just like how antibiotics can create super resistant strains, too many psychedelics can create super egos. The technical term for this is what Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism”—often, our practices can become a source of pride that calcifies our egos even more.

A Guinean tribe uses ginger, tobacco, and then mushrooms progressively as a rite of passage. They would need to pass tests of fasting, sleeplessness, etc. to prove worthiness. Freedom within limits. Innovation builds upon tradition.

Not everyone should consume entheogens. Especially those with adverse medical or family histories (as well as Dark Triad narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths). 3g of psilocybin is the “Goldilocks dosage”. 150milligrams for MDMA. 5-MeO-DMT to replicate the white light death experience.

Times to take them could be ritualistic, like coming of age to set them on the right path of adulthood, weddings, anniversary, and death.

To make sure it is scalable and anti-fragile we would need to keep ingredients open source and resistant to persecution.

Chapter 9: Sex, Part I

Norepinephrine, dopamine, and testosterone flood the system to reward you for your efforts, to prompt you to fulfil the natural urges. The girl’s body responds to visual and olfactory cues of arousal and releases vasoactive intestinal polypeptide, which increase blood flow to her vagina. Plasma seeps from the vaginal walls, making it wet. Two pea-sized glands on either side of the introitus and the cervix secrete mucus.

We like to think our epic tales of romance as testaments to the power of free will and the human spirit. In reality, they’re just as much a catalog of hormonal imperative.

The first rush of coupling causes the testes and ovaries to secrete testosterone and estrogen and fill us with the urge to mate. The hypothalamus pumps out oxytocin and vasopressin, creating potent feelings of trust, attachment, and connection. The hypothalamus secretes dopamine, which peaks with orgasm. Norepinephrine to make our hearts race. We can’t eat or sleep. The caudate nucleus, one of the brain’s major reward centers, lights up when we see images of them. Serotonin drops with early courtship – connected to mood and appetite. Combining these effects looks like OCD and addiction. Literally crazy in love.

Then there’s a 7-year itch, which makes us yearn for novelty, passion, and adventure. Every month, the peak of peak ovulation, women tend to grow dissatisfied with their partner, they can’t stand the way they talk, smell, move, etc. It is assumed that the irritation is to boost the chance of one-night stands with more virile partners. When strippers are ovulating they earn up to 30% higher tips. Likely pheromones. Women search for a dangerous, strong, testosterone laden partner. When a woman climaxes, especially with a new virile lover, her ability to conceive can slide up to 3 full days either direction.

Men reach middle age and acknowledge their mortality and also search for excitement. Drop in testosterone, stamina, and mental clarity. Workout recovery takes way longer. So, he finds a new lover in his forties and then the fog lowers once his test boosts. Now he panics and tries to run back to safety. When women experience menopause, estrogen, vasopressin, and oxytocin taper off. They then decide they are sick of looking after everyone else.

In an experiment where scientists let women rummage around in a bag of pretend dicks they chose on average a 6.3′ size and slightly bigger if they were ovulating. Women get larger breasts, even though that doesn’t equate to more milk. A false signal for male preference. Also, narrow waist and larger glutes.

The Instagram face has converged into: “It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic.

Concealed fertility, abundant recreational sex, permanent female breasts, frequent female orgasm, and larger penises occur nowhere else in the animal kingdom. Along with posture and brain size, sexuality completes the trinity of the decisive respects in which the ancestors of humans and great apes diverged. Moving into a Meaning 3.0 we can repurpose sex as something liberating and intentional.

Chapter 10: Sex, Part II

All of our feel-good neurochemicals, from dopamine and endorphins, to endocannabinoids and oxytocin, are directly triggered by sexual stimulation. A four stage model for sexual arousal was made – excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.

The Fisher Temperament Inventory breaks down personality types into four categories based on which neurochemicals drive a person’s sexual and romantic attachments.

1. The Explorer: the novelty-seeking adventurer who primarily expresses the traits linked with the dopamine system.
2. The Builder: the cautious, socially compliant rule follower who primarily expresses the traits linked with the serotonin system.
3. The Director: the analytical and rigorous thinker who primarily expresses the traits linked with the testosterone system.
4. Negotiator: the pro-social empath who primarily expresses the traits linked with the estrogen system.

The MDMA process is similar to romance. Serotonin levels rise, boosting mood and heightening perception. Oxytocin follows, reducing fear and stress and increasing trust and connectivity. Prolactin is then released in the brain, contributing to a post orgasmic sense of relaxation and receptivity. The neurocircuitry of PTSD is shut down. Hypervigilant amygdales and ventromedial prefrontal cortices reset and get to rewrite their past in a safe place through therapy.

One of the best things for chronic pain is exercise, but that’s a hard sell for someone who is hurting. So, masturbation is an option.

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.

Chapter 11: An Immodest Proposal

The Kitchen Sink Method of experimentation is trying all manners of combinations until you positively get exactly what you were looking for. Then take it into the lab. Work backwards from nice to have to have to have. Removing one variable at a time.

“Twenty-first-century normal” lives on the left-hand side of this graph, where we spend much of our time tired, wired, and stressed. That’s the always-on of agitated beta wave thinking with the steady drip of stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol, poor air exchange in our lungs, low vagal nerve tone, and a fixed psychological mindset that tries to defend our safety and identity in an uncertain world.

While specific details vary tremendously, based on which levers you choose to throw and which tools you’re comfortable deploying, the recipe for a Sexual Yoga of Becoming practice boils down to this:

1. Supersaturate your body and brain with endorphins, dopamine, nitric oxide, oxytocin, and serotonin.
2. Optimize your endocannabinoid system and boost vagal nerve tone.
3. 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.
4. Reset your brain stem with cranial-nerve stimulation and/or selective exposure to molecules like nitrous oxide or ketamine.
5. Pulse energy, in the form of direct or alternating current, magnetism, light, sound waves, pain, or orgasm through your nervous system.
6. Engage and align spine, pelvis, limbs, and soft tissues for a full range of motion and proprioceptive integration and embodiment.
7. Breathe in deliberate patterns to upregulate or downregulate your nervous system by altering the ratios of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen.
8. Play powerful music that syncopates and discombobulates your conscious thinking, and ideally inspires with lyrics that can serve as poetry/living scripture.
9. Take that ride. Don’t flinch (or give in to astonishment). Remember what you forgot. Come home. Do your homework.

To avoid dependence you can use Hedonic Calendaring to create periodic abstinence. Using these tools is like going rock climbing without gear. You need to be skilled and only go up occasionally.

Part III: Ethical Cult Building

Intro:

Building relationships should be done slowly and carefully. Treat your companions as if they had your life in their hands. Do you trust them?

Transactional friendships are unapologetically mercenary. At least one member is in it to get something they desire.

The hedonistic relationship persists for as long as it’s fun.

The virtuous relationship is a much rarer and more valuable commitment. No one left behind king of bond that is required to safely support each other through rough weather and challenging terrain. Make sure everybody is interacting with others and building connections too. No reliance. Create a meshwork. The way to build a community without the cult while keeping it open-source, scalable, and antifragile.

Chapter 12: Everybody Worships

Generational amnesia: we always forget. If we didn’t we’d likely go mad with grief. Each generation assumes the one before wasn’t cool and didn’t know what they were doing and that they themselves have discovered something new. Creating a wisdom gap and repetition of mistakes. “He who only knows his own generation,” Churchill lamented, “remains forever a child.”

Techniques of ecstasy: Never have we ever had so much access to so many things, with so few guidelines, than now. Addiction is ripe.

Digital influencer culture: In the past, if you wanted o be an expert, you had to be an apprentice to a lineage. If you were a scholar you devoted yourself to a PhD. Same for writing, martial arts, yoga, and meditation. With the internet, there are no more gatekeepers. Quality control is out the window.

Rapture ideologies: The collapse of authority, global systemic crises, and tangled mythology makes it hard to predict the future. The more uncomfortable and uncertain, the more tempting it becomes to find comfort in community. The most alluring is the one that confesses to know all the answers.

Lisa Feldman Barrett – Beneath the surface of our emotions is interoception. There are two core axes here: positive to negative and active to passive. You can actively feel positive – like calm and content, you can passively feel 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 is to praise or blame for the way we feel. We feel these when we come across a project we like or a charismatic leader. The simplest interoceptive response is positive passive. We feel good in their company and want to follow where they are going. We happily accept our beta status to follow them. If things get more serious, peak states and deep healing create a charge of active positivity. Most don’t feel this outside a romantic relationship. Sometimes we can confuse spiritual love with erotic love and want to “commune” with them. If you aren’t sure about them you may feel negative passive and end up fearing them and fleeing. In rarer situations you may try to fight them to get rid of the uncomfortable feeling.

There is a 5th option in the center where we feel all of it ourselves. This would fit more into the Meaning 3.0. Instead of dumping our own authority and agency, instead of projecting for good or bad onto the Other, what if we stepped up and owned our potential? We approach collective possibility together.

When we can’t accept our own power, we hang it on the neck of our guru. They are wise, strong, and compassionate. We are not. This projection brings leaders to their knees eventually. We fear our own greatness more than our failure. How are we supposed to keep it up? What will the neighbors think?

The ethical cult seeks to enhance the sovereignty of the individual while increasing the intelligence of the collective. Much harder to do.

Culty-cult status. What not to do:

Grab the ring of power – Absolute power corrupts absolutely. You will not bend the ring to your bidding. It will only corrupt you. These are ways leaders get tripped up.

1. Mythologized origin story of the founder – repeated tales of exceptional conditions surrounding birth, childhood, or talent. Sometimes confirmed with self-appointed name change (business people saying they became ethical).
2. Absolutist claims of attainment – In the spiritual, intellectual, sexual, entrepreneurial, or artistic realms – typically reserved for the founder. Founder is blameless and they claim to have a perfect worldview beyond what is said against them. Enlightenment and dismissal of objective reality as illusory in favor of the power of the mind, visualization, and positive thinking.
3. Ritualized separation – Keeping the leader distinct from operational tasks, duties, and common mingling. Celebrity status with guards and ceremonious clothing.

Creating in/out groups – Us vs Them pulls people into a distortion field. Anything that lifts the group away from their community and traditions.

1. Messianic purpose – The micro community is the macro of the world. The value has significance beyond the lives of those practicing it. The grandiosity of the world saving mission. This can be used to suppress the member’s needs and concerns as petty, selfish, or small-minded.
2. Specialized language – novel terms to redefine everyday concepts or introduce pseudo-spiritual or pseudoscientific terms to convey legitimacy on otherwise unprovable claims. Like the word quantum.
3. Break with past precedent – Declaring a clean slate and forgetting past transgressions and human condition.

Weaponizing peak experience and healing – Ecstasis and Catharsis create impressionable and susceptible states.

1. Tightly controlled access – to techniques of ecstasy like drugs, sex, breath, music, prayer, charismatic transmission, or sensory deprivation, as well as methods of catharsis like body work, group therapy, personal inquiry, specialized diets, cleanses, etc.
2. Emphasis on regressive practices that value feeling over thinking.
3. Key decisions and commitment encouraged or forced while in non-ordinary states. No deferment until somebody clear-headed can assess.

Unfortunately a list like this isn’t fool proof for spotting cults. Here are some other signs:

1. False negatives: A lot of “healthy” communities will do this with ritualized restriction to peaks. Especially those with strong in-group identities. Religions, martial arts lineages, frats, and start ups can display positive versions. Deep structures of belonging that can evolve naturally from the group from the feeling of tribalism.
2. False positives: Coming in everybody looks happy due to ecstatic and cathartic techniques. The community looks legit until they break down.
3. Talented but tainted: Often after a scandal or community collapse, people will label the leader as a fraud. In high level cults they are often skilled at something which nobody can dispute, even if they are taking advantage of their community. Hard to see the decline.

Chapter 13: The Ethical Cult(ure) Toolbox

Pascal’s Wager: At least conceive of the inconceivable, just in case it turns out to be true.

Occam’s Razor: The simplest solution is usually the best.

Bayesian Probability: Track everything that might be true but isn’t yet certain, and update dynamically as you learn more.

Cheat Codes for the Infinite Game

1. The game has an infinite number of levels in an infinite number of dimensions.
2. The purpose of the game is to remember you are playing (anamnesis).
3. The more levels of the game you remember you’re playing, the more fun (and consequential) the game becomes.
4. 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).
5. 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!
6. Don’t say anything, or think anything, that you don’t want to become more true.
7. Once you’ve figured out the game, help turn as many NPCs (nonplayable characters) into players and players into architects as you can.
8. Stay awake. Build stuff. Help out.

The Ten Suggestions:

1. Do the obvious. Sleep deeply, move frequently, eat real food, get outside, bathe often, play music, breathe deeply, grieve fully, make love, give thanks. After this put all that remaining time and energy into living a vitalized and engaged life.
2. Don’t do stupid shit. Don’t end up in a cult, a body bag, a jail cell, divorce court, rehab, or a mental institution. You’ll ruin it for the rest of us and it’ll all get shut down.
3. Let the mystery stay the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. 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.
4. 80/20 Awoken to broken. Being human equates to a lot of pain and extreme peaks. Don’t bother hunting for the high. Help those around you get their heads above the water. All we need is 80% of the hit to remember what we forgot and what we’re here to do – and then GO DO IT!
5. Fuck your journey. Love keeps no record of wrong. Whatever got us here is an essential part of the path and utterly irrelevant compared to the exquisite quality of the moment we’re blessed to share. Stop rehashing your breakdowns and breakthroughs. Show us how much you’ve grown. But, dear God, please stop telling us.
6. Do the hard thing. Fortune favors the prepared. If it’s your job to eat two frogs, eat the big one first. The obstacle is the way.
7. Never lose the one. Maintain the consensus of reality, your center of gravity, or the point of your objective. Do your tricks but stick the landing.
8. And it’s not that either! Whenever we think we’ve found It, we get a huge dopamine hit of pattern recognition and a sense of certainty that it’s all overwhelmingly true – for us, in that moment. But whenever you take a lowercase “t” and make it Truth, it becomes false, just by overstating the claim. You can no more become fully enlightened than you can become fully educated. Take your insights for what they are, integrate them, and keep going.
9. Practice resurrection. Practice dying to our rightness, our stories, our pleasure, and our pain. Psychedelics, meditation, breath work, sexuality, martial arts, and extreme sports.
10. Above all, be kind. None of it matters if we forget this part.

Sacraments. Timing, tuning, and balance. We may lose our way, lose physical health, inattention to cues, drop in drive, etc. With perfect pitch, the change in tune is obvious. The heightened perception of peak state lets us hear that discrepancy clearly and recalibrate the instrument of ourselves. Sacraments also serve as training wheels. Put on the training wheels to heal without danger. Provide those with love and support ready to be let go again.

Scriptures. Using stories and wisdom of those passed to reinvigorate yourself and to find answers. Salvation and inclusion. Sacred stories that speak to us all, bond us together, inspire us to do better, and heal us when we need it most. People who read narratives build stronger social cohesion. Bookworm’s default mode network show more activity devoted to empathy. We’re kinder and wiser when we can imagine the lives of others. People who learned their family story across generations had a higher sense of self-esteem and self-control. Also, more resilience in the face of trauma. Stories that are relatable. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?

Chapter 14: Team Omega

“The concentration of a conscious universe would be unthinkable if it did not assemble in itself . . . every consciousness . . . remaining conscious of itself at the end of the operation . . .” Teilhard writes, “each one becoming more itself and therefore more distinct from the others the closer it comes to them in Omega.”

The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh echoed this idea when he 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.

“Will there be refusal or acceptance of Omega?” he wondered. “A conflict may be generated . . . the noosphere would cleave into two zones attracted respectively towards two antagonistic poles of adoration. . . . Universal love ultimately vitalizing and detaching only a fraction of the noosphere to consummate it—the fraction which will have decided to ‘take the step’ out of itself into the Other.”

Chenoweth at Harvard’s Kennedy School has famously posited that 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. As we hurtle toward the final reckoning of the Omega Point, Teilhard envisioned exactly how it would all go down—a race of three intersecting curves: the viability of the planet, those drawn to inclusion, and those dedicated to separation.

Chapter 15: Pondering the Yonder

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.

Elton Trueblood described: “Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” 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. That’s the gift and power of a fully transformative ecstatic, cathartic experience. We get to not only say but truly mean: “This I remember, and today I begin again.”

To keep this running we need to resist the urge to explain the unknown though stories, anthropomorphizing, deifying, reifying it. Let the mystery stay the mystery.

We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from… We’re made of star stuff. – Carl Sagan.

Without engaging in metaphysical guesswork, we can explore several explanations of the Informational Layer that don’t require a leap of faith. They represent reasonable inferences from established science. That’s not to say any of these will turn out to be true. Advances in theory, measurement, and exploration will certainly replace them with more accurate models over time. However, it is time to move on from reductionist materialism of the New Atheists and their blanket dismissal of truths that don’t submit to microscopes or telescopes. A rational mysticism – call it New Platonism. It still values evidence, reason, and logic, but also leaves room for what lies beyond our ken.

Four explanations for where information in peak states comes from, starting from most empirical to more conjectural:

1. The Umwelt Effect: The raw data of reality is blowing past us at millions of bits per second. Most of that time, our regular waking consciousness, tuned and calibrated to the “overworked primate” setting, ignores nearly all of it. That’s what Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley called the “reducing valve of consciousness.” Our conscious mind processes 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 that we can perceive expands with it. Hopped-up neurochemistry, hyperconnected neuroanatomy, and optimized neuro-electricity let us pick up on more of what’s swirling past us every second anyway. For a strict materialist, this is the leanest, most Occam’s razor-ish explanation.
2. The Ancestor Effect: In the past decade, a slew of studies have shown trace markers of physical and mental health getting passed down from generation to generation. Methylation, i.e., the ability of genes to turn on or off depending on real-world conditions, RNA, a single-strand nucleic acid that signals to DNA, and histones, the proteins that DNA is scaffolded onto, are possible mechanisms by which we “remember” past generations’ experience. If, in non-ordinary states of consciousness, our umwelt expands, we might somehow access that accumulated experience more consciously. Pretty hard to comprehend, but “ancestor cults” seek guidance from those who have come before by venturing into non-ordinary states.
3. The Star stuff: 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 a remembering of that simple fact. As Iris Schrijver acknowledges, “Very little of our physical bodies lasts for more than a few years. Of course, that’s at odds with how we perceive ourselves. . . . But we’re not fixed at all. We’re more like a pattern or a process. . . . This transience of the body and the flow of energy and matter led us to explore our interconnectedness with the universe.” In that stunning recognition, each of us can see ourselves as Omegans. But we’ll have to die to the illusion of our individual separation to glimpse it.
4. The Information Layer: For as long as philosophers have thought about it, they’ve supposed that there is a realm of reality beyond what our umwelt or five senses can perceive. That realm, they’d insist, is more true, more complete than anything we live in our day-to-day. Plato called it the Realm of Ideal Forms. “Physics gives rise to observer-participancy,” Wheeler says, “observer-participancy gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics.” Round and round we go.

When we have a breakthrough and try to explain it to our loved ones, we have a mismatch. Our leading edge in Kairos gets precisely matched up with their bleeding edge in Chronos. Those closest to us aren’t ready or willing to trust the New Me, until we’ve acknowledged and atoned for the Old Me that might have hurt them in the past. They’re not wrong. We probably were being selfish, hurtful, weak, or distracted back then. It’s not until we are willing to get off our high horse and shovel some shit that they can feel safe enough to work through the trauma that we may have had a hand in creating. The temptation is to be sucked into a bypass. Frustrated by their hesitance, or refusal to acknowledge our growth, we can get peevish, withdraw, and delve deeper into spiritual books, online forums, or new friends who “get us” and speak our language. After a few months you might even think you’re not on the same journey anymore and that you’re just more committed to growth/spirituality/healing than they are. Sometimes people do grow apart but more often than not, the people who are closest have seen all the flaws and they want to come along but find it hard to trust after previous wounding and radical changes. They need stability and resolution. Our own “personal journeys”, if unchecked can lead to a dangerous ego inflation and distortion.

Conclusion: The Four Horsemen Cometh

Danger mouse:

• When Huberman stimulated the nucleus reuniens of mice, they got braver and stood their ground. Activation of the ventro-medial thalamus. Consistently increased arousal and salience-enhancing courageous behaviors… in the direct presence of a perceived threat. They have positive valences. They crave courage and so do we. Strongly reinforcing and the areas are associated with sexual arousal. We’d rather be brave than get laid. It’s this sort of courage that could.

Tank man:

• It’s every moment where a person, with their backs against the wall, choose to sacrifice safety and security to do what must be done, with as much courage and grace, and dignity as they can muster. As much as we like to imagine ourselves as heroes, we sink to the level of our training. “Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit.” The only training up to the occasion is death training. If we don’t transcend our survival programming, at the crux, we’ll flinch. By practicing resurrection, we come back, again and again, to that singular point where we have the chance to move beyond a life of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. We’re wired for courage at the deepest levels of our being. We don’t need to fixate on the exaggerated hero examples, we can acknowledge the day to day. A schoolkid protecting the bullied on the playground, a stranger offering the homeless some kindness, a mother working 3 jobs to support her kids. Our courage is always there, dormant but potent. When we act on it, it sends shockwaves through time and space. A force multiplier. Our ace in the hole of heartache.

Soul force:

• The “possibility grows for moving goodness forward in the world.” Soul force became the foundational strategy of social justice movements everywhere. Thurman – The man on the cross is Anthropos. We cannot take him down until everybody is ready. Take out the nails, remove the crown of thorns, forgive ourselves and each other.

Radical hope:

• We might do everything we can and still not make it. “We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilization are themselves vulnerable.” – Jonathan Lear. “A shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. The inability to conceive of its own devastation, will tend to be a blind spot of any culture.” We can’t wait for the ship to right itself in radical hope. “What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends our current ability to understand what it is.” The persistent sense that somehow, in the end, it all works out.
• If we are to finally pull together to save each other, it will be a nail biter. We are going to need every last bit of energy to pull this off. Cornel West – “The question’s not having hope, it’s being hope.”