Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its [Hardcover]

“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 Maté, MD, author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts:
Close Encounters With Addiction

A 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 big
idea. 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 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.

It’s vital that we regain
control of the stories we’re telling because they are shaping the future we’re
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, we’ve got a shot at solving the big problems we face. And if we
can’t?  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 it’s 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 tlcC