“A highly personal, richly informed and culturallywide-ranging meditation on the loss of meaning in our times and on pathways torediscovering it.” —Gabor Maté, MD, author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts:Close Encounters With AddictionA neuroanthropologist maps out a revolutionary new practice—Hedonic Engineering—that combines the best of neuroscience and optimal psychology. It’s an intensive program of breathing, movement, and sexuality that mends trauma, heightens inspiration and tightens connections—helping us wake up, grow up, and show up for a world that needs us all.This is a book about a bigidea. And the idea is this: Slowly over the past few decades, and now suddenly,all at once, we’re suffering from a collapse in Meaning. Fundamentalism andnihilism are filling that vacuum, with consequences that affect us all. In aworld that needs us at our best, diseases of despair, tribalism, and disasterfatigue are leaving us at our worst.It’s vital that we regaincontrol of the stories we’re telling because they are shaping the future we’recreating. To do that, we have to remember our deepest inspiration, heal ourpain and apathy, and connect to each other like never before. If we can dothat, we’ve got a shot at solving the big problems we face. And if wecan’t? Well, the dustbin of history has swallowed civilizations older andfancier than ours. This book is divided intothree parts. The first, Choose Your Own Apocalypse, takes a look atour current Meaning Crisis--where we are today, why it’s so hard to makesense of the world, what might be coming next, and what to do about it. It alsomakes a case that many of our efforts to cope, whether anxiety and denial, ortribalism and identity politics, are likely making things worse.The middle section, TheAlchemist Cookbook, applies the creative firm IDEO’s design thinkingto the Meaning Crisis. This is where the book gets hands on--taking a look atthe strongest evolutionary drivers that can bring about inspiration, healing,and connection. From breathing, to movement, sexuality, music, andsubstances--these are the everyday tools to help us wake up, grow up, and showup. AKA--how to blow yourself sky high with household materials. And the bestpart? They’re accessible, by anyone anywhere, no middleman required.Transcendence democratized.The final third of thebook, Ethical Cult Building, focuses on the tricky nature ofputting these kinds of experiences into gear and into culture—because, anytimein the past when we’ve figured out combinations of peak states and deephealing, we’ve almost always ended up with problematic culty communities.Playing with fire has left a lot of people burned. This section lays out aroadmap for sparking a thousand fires around the world--each one unique andtailored to the needs and values of its participants. Think of it as anopen-source toolkit for building ethical culture.In Recapture theRapture, we’re taking radical research out of the extremes and applying itto the mainstream--to the broader social problem of healing, believing, andbelonging. It’s providing answers to the questions we face: how to replaceblind faith with direct experience, how to move from broken to whole, and howto cure isolation with connection. Said even more plainly, it shows us how torevitalize our bodies, boost our creativity, rekindle our relationships, andanswer once and for all the questions of why we are here and what do wedo now?In a world that needs the bestof us from the rest of us, this is a book that shows us how to get it done.
