Part I: Choose Your Own Apocalypse
- The world is facing an exponential meaning crisis as traditional religion (Meaning 1.0) and global liberalism (Meaning 2.0) collapse.
- Apocalyptic Rapture ideologies are seductively spreading as people seek escape and redemption.
- To navigate, we need cognitive complexity to ponder uncertain futures, grieve fully, and connect with each other as a global species.
Part II: The Alchemist Cookbook
- Ancient techniques of ecstasy (respiration, embodiment, music, sacraments, sex) can provide inspiration, healing, and connection.
- Used carefully, these drivers of human physiology and psychology offer an open source toolkit to wake up, grow up, and show up.
Part III: Ethical Cult Building
- Mixing peak experiences and healing often leads to cults. To avoid this, a "rational mysticism" balancing tradition and innovation is proposed.
- An open source ethical culture tool kit combines metaphysics, ethics, sacraments, scriptures, and deities to build coherent communities.
- Self-initiation into higher levels of consciousness via a "sexual yoga of becoming" death/rebirth ritual is possible by stacking the big five techniques.
Conclusion: The Four Horsemen Cometh
- Courage, compassion, and radical hope are needed to navigate an uncertain future to an Omega Point harmony of individuality and connectedness.
- Reversing engineered revelation and becoming "homegrown humans" helps us recapture the rapture and find timeless meaning in times of crisis.
The book advocates carefully engineering non-ordinary states to prompt insight, integration, and bonding as an "open source" approach to addressing the meaning crisis. But it cautions this is potent territory requiring ethics and discernment to avoid cultic dynamics. Overall it presents an optimistic vision of a "rational mysticism" to cultivate individual and collective awakening.