Jamie Wheal: Finding the Line Between Savoring and Saving
Jamie Wheal is the founder of the Flow Genome Project, a organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance, and most notably, he’s the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost its Mind. In his fascinating book, Wheal explores the perplexing intersection at which we find ourselves, each of us torn between the desire to save the world or to savor the world. “We as a generational cohort are coming of age where we simultaneously have more awareness of life...and at the same time understand our existential precariousness,” he says, “How on earth do we hold all this at the same time?” Our wide ranging discussion takes on the heady topics of healing, believing, and belonging and ends with Wheal sharing with us his ‘ten suggestions', a list of countermeasures to the fundamentalism, nihilism, and despair that threaten to swallow us whole.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
To save the world or to savor the world…(Approx. 3:09)
Nihilism, suspicion and our meaning crisis…(Approx. 6:48)
Reclaiming our authority, healthy tribalism, and the ten suggestions…(Approx. 30:40)
MORE FROM JAMIE WHEAL
Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind
Jamie's Flow Genome Project - The Official Source for Peak Performance and Culture
Follow Jamie on Instagram
DIG DEEPER:
TRANSCRIPT:
(Slightly edited for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I loved your book. I thought it was like such a fun, insightful, profound, funny romp. I guess you could almost call it a romp. Like I feel like you covered major ground fast, which I'm always a fan of, while getting into some of these more profound questions which are, how do we either savor or save the world when we find ourselves at this perplexing intersection, which is how you start the book. We are stuck.
JAMIE WHEAL:
I always think of George Clooney in Our Brother Where Art Though, where he's like, “We're in a tight spot!” Which you know, this feels like that anyway, any direction you look right now.
ELISE:
Exactly. And then I feel like there's he guilt of either you, you talk about it as the coming together of two intersections, the coming alive arc and the staying alive arc and how we are right where they meet. And I feel like depending on the day, we're either trying to live life to fullest and lean into it and enjoy ourselves, or we're bound by fear and uncertainty about our ability to survive in any which way.
JAMIE:
Yeah, and there’s sort of at least three levels of that intersection, right. Of coming alive and staying alive. And, just for listeners that haven’t't read the book and you just kind of alluded to that E.B. White quote and, you know, that's the author of Charlotte's Web. And he wrote, “I wake up every morning, torn between the desire to savor the world and save the world. But then I realized that in fact, the savoring has to come first because if there was nothing to savor, there would be nothing worth saving.” So that, that kind of feels like, that dialectic between those two feels like where a lot of us are these days. And it feels like it's happening on the kind of personal level plus the social level, plus the kind of cosmic or existential level. So like personal, like I, anybody can grow up to be president, I'm going to be an astronaut, or I'm going to get my MBA.
And then I'm going to get my job at McKinsey, or I'm going to do whatever I'm going to do, or I'm going to get my Eurail pass, go backpacking around Europe, you know, or whatever our hashtag #bestlife was going to be. You know? And then there's the triage of: “What's happening to the economy? What's happening to the climate? What's happening to my job? What's happening to fires or floods or droughts where I live? Should I be someplace else? Should I be doing something else?” Like all of that kind of herky-jerky. And then there's even the kind of bigger level, which I don't unpack in the book just for sheer space reasons. But I think it's arguably the most profound is, you know, we, as a generation, as a generational cohort of say baby boomers, gen X-ers, millennials at a bare minimum coming of age at a time where we simultaneously have more awareness of just life, the universe and everything, you know, telescopes that, you know, the large Hadron Collider and the Hubble telescope that can see just in galaxies.
And we can understand the moments of creation at the big bang. And at the same time also understand our existential precariousness. Wow. We're also leveling up into the highest, most expensive, joyful, ecstatic, integrated, and whole expressions of humans that have ever been. And we're sort of being born into this, or even sort of like reborn into a world, going, holy shit, we're alive. This is amazing! Just in time to realize the very same techno-economic society that provided the conditions of abundance and stability to let us do all that beautiful waking up and hatching is also potentially responsible for our pending undoing.
And that’s a total mind fuck! And then throw in cell phones, broadcast around the world, some poor guy in a overlooked state saying “I can't breathe.” You, you have the burden of the alpha and omega. We know where we've come from. We know where we're heading on a cosmic scale. And at the same time, we're plugged into human suffering, injustice, and any of the other, you know, wounds of the world at a level that if I just grew up in my little village, in my little town, with my head down reading a local paper hearing gossip from the nearby, you know, the across the river never had a hold. So it's, it's an awful lot. I mean, it's the E.O. Wilson, that Harvard biologist who said, you know, “We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology.” And you know that that's a pithy kind of summing up of how on earth do we all hold, hold all this at the same time?
ELISE:
That's one of my very favorite quotes, because we've all had those moments where it's like, we can't. And so much of the book is in some ways about tools, or a cattle prod of like, we need to get, we need to heal ourselves and then get over ourselves. We'll get to the list of 10 suggestions in a minute because they made me laugh…many of them and cry! But yes, as you say, holding, holding the whole thing at once is in some ways unbearable. And yet it also feels like the only way forward, and that until we reconcile ourselves around some of these big issues at a time when we also seem to be more divided than ever, what will there be left to save? And I love too how you go into this idea of nihilism versus I wouldn't even call it belief, I'd call it faith. But how, when in this, in, in our culture, in this absence of God, how nihilism is sort of rushing in to fill that space? I can't remember you mentioned the quote, “There's a godlike hole.”
JAMIE:
Yeah, Blaise Pascal.
ELISE:
And that, we're also at this moment, many of us feel like we don't, we're missing the bigger picture. We don't …there is no meaning, or there is no point. And that that nihilism can be devastating on all the levels you mention: personal, social, existential.
JAMIE:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like you know, we're all wrestling with it and, you know, nature abhors a vacuum, but so does culture and into the vacuum of our meaning crisis, with both organized religion and neoliberal institutions, academics, government, all the things kind of be, you know, everybody's profoundly suspicious of everything, and trusting no one. And, you know, into that vacuum, you get QAnon, you get anti-vax conspiracies. You get all sorts of cultic mutations because our need for meaning doesn't go away. It's just our usual watering holes have dried up. So we start drinking from stagnant, sketchy ditches and, and, uncovered ponds. And you're like, “Well, you probably shouldn't do that.” But I'm really thirsty.
ELISE:
I want to talk about the dark triad, and I want to get to cults. Because I liked your list. To me, it felt like a, a useful summation of the environment that's created. The, I mean, there have always been cults, obviously this is not new. And there are tons of cults, many of which are positive or could be positive, but, but let's talk first about sort of, I think it was that Queensland University of Technology study that you talk about, around where you're, they were looking at Radical Left, Progressive Liberal, and White Identity and how prone each group was towards sort of the dark triad authoritarian traits. And essentially they found that far, far left progressives far, right were inclined, equally. Right? And then it's really only sort of this middle that can hold space for gray.
JAMIE:
Yeah. Pretty much. And obviously, you know, that, that was a specific study. I think the sample size was maybe 500 or 800 folks, so limited, you know, so, so interesting for further study with all the kind of normal disclaimers on social sciences and replication and that kind of thing. And, you know, it did sort of point out back to that, that Yeats quote, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity,” and you realize, oh shit. In the culture wars, you know, on both sides, most folks embedded in the culture wars, there's a bunch of well-meaning and intentional people on both sides, right? You go to conservative America and you're like, hey man, these people value self-sufficiency and reliance. They value community and interdependence. They value patriotism and pride of country and place. There's all sorts of good things in that mix, but they get whipped into a frenzy by alt-right identitarians about migrant caravans and disease. You know, all the old ploys, you know, disease, depravity, crime, corruption, all that, the kind of impurity stereotyping and they get persuaded.
And the same thing with progressives that are like, Hey, you know, race, class, gender, these things should, all, all humans should be met with dignity, you know, care and concern. And the question is, is when does that slip slide into sort of, you know, Marxism Maoism, and you see those kinds of signs. And in general, it's not the center of gravity of either of those movements, which generally can be well-intentioned folks with potentially noble value systems that you want, you want in a civil society. You want that you want those dialogues. It's the folks that constantly go to seek power and constantly seek to hijack those movements for other ends that are often the onespushing to get to the front of the line and pushing to get further ahead.
And, you know, a now compromised example is the French actor, Gerard Depardieu, pre-Me Too, you had actually done a film way back when called Danton about the French revolution. And Danton was actually one of the original Liberty Equality Fraternity guys of the French Revolution. And then Robespierre comes in and out-flanks him and he gets his head chopped off, you know, and then Robespierre drives it to the Reign of Terror. And I just remember seeing that in college and just going, oh, you know, those flanking movements. And you can see it with Trump's weaponization of the term RINO, which, you know, means Republican in Name Only, which is an exact and precise definition of him. He doesn't hold a single conservative position. He's a naked populist and an opportunist, but it used to mean people just like him. He's now turning that around to say, if you're an old-school conservative you, if you're a Reagan, William F. Buckley conservative, you're anti-Soviet union, anti-big government, anti-taxation, pro-NATO, pro-militarization, you're now, you're now a RINO. I'm not a RINO, you are.
So you see this doublespeak flips and the same thing with weaponized intersectionality, you know, where someone can be a cog. I mean, there was the, there was that professor, I think she was at Reed. And finally I'm certain, she was at Reed, who was a self, as she-described herself, a lesbian Chicana, you know, social political professor. And she wasn't even tenured. She was adjunct. So she's like, I am as marginalized as marginalized can be as a person, as a professional. And at the same time when there was readings against racism, student movement against teaching Western Civ, and she's like, “Whoa, whoa, wait a second. Western Civ has got some really useful values. Like there's actually tons to learn here from the classics. And from these other things.” She then ended up getting tarred as not progressive enough.
And so you see those movements, Cornell West just did an op-ed on the same thing when Princeton looked to ban the study of the requirement for Latin and Greek, for the Classics Department. He's like, “You know, Letters from a Birmingham Jail man, MLK read Socrates. There's, there's stuff there we care about.” So there's just those movements to the extremes. And it's a power play typically by opportunists who are wielding whatever is the current discussion, or conversation and the language and the vernacular and the value sets of otherwise important and vital social civic conversations, and then weaponizing them for, for their own gain.
ELISE:
I'm sure you're familiar with Loretta Ross, but she talks about sort of like I'm, you know, radical Black feminist. And she talks about how she's interested in movements, not cults and that within the movement, when people start to assert that people have to care about the exact same things or have the exact same stance on every single issue, you're in a cult. And that there is that sort of growing demand and requirement on both sides that as you say, starts to persuade people who are very much in the middle. And I loved, I'd actually never heard this acronym MAD: “mutually assured dissatisfaction.” But you write about how you write: “At its worst, this kind of strategic stalemate leads to stagnation and frustration. At its best, this sort of agnostic liberalism leads to the kinds of hard-won compromises that delight virtually no one and frustrate nearly everyone and perversely expand the chance to keep playing the infinite game with more and more players, better than any other options we've found.” And I love that idea of government. Cause I feel like so many of us rail against like the inefficiency or lack of effective government, but that's maybe what it, when it's at its best in the slow plotting sort of like ship, that's hard to steer off course. You certainly don't want it to be taken over by an insane captain.
JAMIE:
Yeah. And that, and that actually there's two folks if people are interested in tracking that down, one is Alison Gopnik at Cal Berkeley. And she's written about that. She's like, look, this idea that we're all going to get to kumbaya and be singing out of the same hymn book, like we had that idea in the 19th and early 20th centuries and then you got Nazi-ism, you got all the isms: communism, fascism, you know, all the things. And people were like, whoops, like, you know, tops-down, centrally enforced utopias end up in blood bath. So maybe we shouldn't keep pushing on that. And, and, and actually I do use the term agnostic later in the book, this particular one is actually “agonistic liberalism” and that, and that’s OK, I'd never come across the term either, but it's Jonathan Lear at London School of Economics.
And he talks about agonistic. Like literally we are in opposition to each other jostling around and we never figure it out. But what we're trying to do is not get to hegemonic consensus. We're just, you know, we are trying to keep doing, doing that mutually assured dissatisfaction, you know, which is every PTA meeting, every HOA meeting, every, you know, if anyone's ever participated in sitting on any kind of civic board or nonprofit, anything they're nightmares. Yeah. You know, it's like stick a fork in my eyeballs. I can't believe this is, you know, this is what passes for effective governance. And yet, you know, we haven't come up with something better, other than like the sort of Rousseauian notion of the enlightened despot, you know, which is if you could find the sort of, you know, Plato's idea of the, the, the enlightened philosopher king who just had it right. Yeah. Maybe we're going to try that in Texas with Matthew McConaughey when he runs for governor. We'll see.
ELISE:
So I want to talk about sort of like this idea of seeding a revolution or giving people the tools, sort of the recipe for cult. This idea, you, you cite these four reasons, which seemed as good as any I've read. I've very interested in the formation of cults, because I think that we, we tend to, and you hear it like this discrediting of, oh, people are just brainwashed and apparently that's actually very hard to do or that people must be dumb for believing these things. But I think that I liked your ideas of sort of 1. generational amnesia, which is helpful how, as you talk about it in the context of childbirth, but problematic, because we seem to forget where these things can go, and granted, like so many cults, the historically the ones that have gone really awry, like started out and really theoretically positive fertile ground, right? Like they're typically is sort of an idea of some sort of utopia that goes awry.
JAMIE:
Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, I had a quirky professor in college who just always used to throw us curve balls. Like he had us there's, there's a 1973 documentary on the Manson family. And I think it won an Academy Award or maybe a, a Palm d'Or at Cannes for best documentary of the year. And it was original footage. So it wasn't one of those like ABC, you know, Sunday night, you know, docu-dramas with shitty actors and that kind of thing. It was like all original footage of the family at the Spahn Ranch up in Topanga Canyon and it's blonde hair, and guitars ,and skinny dipping by the waterfall. And it is idyllic. And, and then they get interviewed and you're like, “Oh shit, 90% of what they're saying, spot on critique of like Eisenhower 50s culture. They're like, you were conditioned, you were programmed. You have your job, your career, you're a little plastic person. You're sexually repressed. You need to open up blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Death is life. Life is death. Let's go kill the pigs.” And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, rewind the tape. What, what was that last bit? And you realize you're like, oh. Like, you know, like, and this is true for today, right? I mean, if you looked at 2016 election, Bernie and Trump had nearly identical critiques of what was wrong in America for the common man. Their prescriptions went in completely opposite directions. And so when we get suckered in by people who can accurately diagnose the problem, we then become easily snookered by their then proposed solutions. So if they constantly push on all our sore spots, they're like, it's sore here. Right. And you're like, yes, it's sore. And they’re, like, it's sore here, too. Right. And you're like, yeah, how'd, you know, and then, you know, by the time they've focused enough, we're just suckers for their prescriptions. But that's really where we have to be vigilant and really like triple-triangulate. What are your truth claims? What are you saying? What are the implications of doing what you're saying? You know, and can we maintain our own common sense and judgment? And that obviously goes out the window when we're scared, we're lonely, we're confused. And people offer us certainty, community, and dignity and then throw in peak states and healing, and all of our boundaries come down and we're just putty in the hands of someone who would like to shake that.
ELISE:
Right. And, or a prisoner, you know? Because I think that, that's the other thing about many of the cults is that people were trying to escape. It's not that everyone just sort of walked off a cliff necessarily like a lemming. It was, you know, it's its own thing. But so that leads, you've mentioned sort of the techniques of ecstasy, which I know we should talk…I want to sort of come back to that and talk about that at length, since you get into psychedelics and their potential, and their problems, and where they can get us a little stuck in an eddy perfect healing.
JAMIE:
Or in Jamaica.
ELISE:
Or in Jamaica. And also digital influencer culture, this is certainly something I am very, I mean, we're all familiar with this, this idea that anyone can have a platform. Anyone can produce content. Like the day of the fact checker is over or not entirely, but that these, you talk about them as pretenders to the throne and the ability to sort of hit those sore spots and spin it up. And suddenly you're taking people on a real ride. And I feel like people, when I've seen this happen, sort of the guru-ification of people who may or may not have good or bad intentions, or it's probably a mixed bag. It's what I see happen when I've watched this is that people will also credit them. You know, it's hard cause they'll be like, “Oh, this person opened my eyes to so many things that were true about me, or made me feel seen, or reflected back to me a reality that I've always sensed and never been able to fully express whatever it may be.” And then they sort of start on this meandering path. And I think it's really hard. I think we're inherently very loyal. Right. And, and it's really difficult, I think as a human to figure out…and we were talking about this in the context of the classics. What do I discard? What do we bring forward and what do we discard? And like, we tend to do this wholesale rejection right of someone, if they have some problem, it's very difficult for us to pick and choose unless we're like figuring out what quote to put up on Instagram. But I think it's a very huge, it's a kind of loving and loyal of humans, but it makes us, it doesn't inhibit our ability to parse what's there.
JAMIE:
So are you, are you describing that loyalty in regard to somebody in a sort of teacherly or authority who first provides you with that hit, and then you become kind of beholden to them or stick with them? I mean, look, I think the combination of the echo-boomer, so effectively millennials, just not like a staggering knowledge gap as to what their parents did and all the lessons learned from the late-sixties through the mid-seventies. So basically whether it's Johnny Depp's Blow, or it's Boogie Nights, or it's any of those movies, right. They all start out awesome in the sixties. Everyone's just like smoking weed and hanging out and listening to, you know, favorite folk song. And it's, it gets a little freakier and deekier in the seventies and people are in their sexuality, and there's free lov,e and there's others things.
And then the wheels come off and it's like, cocaine, heroine, and AIDS. And then I am, you know, straight into the wall. We've seen these movies and the, that knowledge gap is real. And the pain point is like, at least let's make new, different, more complicated, spectacular mistakes. Let's not just send it off the cliff in the same exact hairpin turn our parents did. And then there is the, I think it is incalculable, really, the damage that digital narcissism is doing to the kind of quote unquote “wisdom marketplace.” And again, the thing that really, I don't know, it just boggles my mind that we're not on the other side of it. We're in the thick of it, which is, it feels like Kurt Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle, when he wrote way back when about Bokonon and that kind of imaginary religion.
But then I think there was a CIA government project or something to create Ice-Nine, which would, could then was a chemical that could turn all the water molecules on the earth to ice. And it's effectively just end life, right? Because there would be no way to survive that. So Ice-Nine is this metaphor for this capacity to get out ahead of any efforts to fix it. And it feels like social media influencer culture is the psycho-spiritual equivalent of Ice-Nine. Cecause what's happening is that someone can have a profound breakthrough. You can go to the rainforest of Peru and have an Ayahuasca experience where you could go to Burning Man and have a totally amazing, you know, breakthrough experience. But no sooner had you done that, the people that are like, even in their mind and, you know, composing their first breathless social media posts: “Dear friends, I know you've all been missing me ,and wondering what I'm up to, but just here's an update and an overshare overshare, you know, to get the rubbernecking thumb scrollers to stop enough, to be like, oh, here's some carrion and I can pick off.
And then, and then, oh, by the way, and if you're interested in a little bit more of this click on the link below, need a swipe up swipe, right? And, and see me at the next workshop. And people have already rolled even the most profound experiences back into a digital avatar, back into their representational self. And, you know, and we're seeing it in practical terms in outdoor culture as well. So not just psychedelics, not just transformational culture stuff, you're seeing it in, you know, “Head West young man, goseek refuge in the mountains. Natural aw, wilderness is when you renewal all those timeless things.” And now they're, uh, Instagram posts that are being geotagged for remote waterfalls, beautiful natural, hot springs sitting on top of summits and peaks. And now everybody sees that and then overwhelms places. And in Aspen, just two weeks ago and repeatedly for the last several years, there's a place called Capitol Peak.
It's one of the most vivid scenic peaks, but it's got this knife’s edge ridge that you have to kind of like really shimmy along to get to the summit. But a bunch of ass-hats on YouTube have posted videos. And now 10 to 15 people a summer are falling off it to their deaths and overwhelming local search and rescue, who are then risking their lives. In fact, two weeks ago four search and rescue folks got killed by a subsequent rockfall trying to go and do a body recovery of another fucking YouTuber. So you're like, you know, so, so whether it's psychedelic experiences, where it’s consciousness festival experiences, whether it's outdoor experiences, we are projecting into the digital world and getting ahead of that, the very things that could restore us to our own sanity and selfhood. And it's a recursive double-bind.
ELISE:
Getting over our skis, you know, and I know that's on this list of 10 things that I want to get to, but to finish the, four, the rapture ideologies—in terms of the cult. This idea of like, we live at such a strange time and space, we're all struggling with uncertainty, which is the reality and the through-line of life, although I don't think that it's been as present to us as it has been in the last 18 months, two years, but that, that makes us quite ripe for wanting someone who, who seems to have the answers. Or who can offer a path to some sort of certainty.
JAMIE:
100 percent. We're scared, little monkeys hurtling through space.
ELISE:
Your book is also sort of offering, I loved that quote from Stuart Brand in the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” You're sort of also offering a bit of a template for, okay, this is where we find ourselves. And in order to move forward, we need to, you sort of suggest feel our feelings, but like this, this sacrament that must happen as we sort of not, it's not that leaders are going to rise again, same, that's the same idea, like the same guru-ification, who are going to lead us out of this, but we have to figure out how to seed each other and the planet and the world with ways to sort of, I guess, come to sense, right? Or come to some sense of belonging or become rulers of ourselves. So at least we're not harming other people.
JAMIE:
Yeah. And I mean, you know, to a, to a bit of our earlier conversation, I mean, my sense is is yes, it's kind of a, it's a trope, right? That clever people thinking, thinky thoughts get together and go, “Oh, this is a problem in consciousness.” And then somebody will have, you know, always pipe in with the Einstein. “You can't solve the problem at the same level that created it.” Right. And then, you know, it gives us permission, all, you know, to meditate, do yoga and, you know, drop acid, whatever. I think that notion that we should, we have to have a global-centric perspective to be able to handle the interconnected global problems we have is legit. And the idea that we want to get beyond ethno nationalism and start seeing all of our brothers and sisters on the planet as connected legit, however.
However, we had 50 years of just perfect eye on the ball, and then we completely shat the bed. Did not pull it off. So, and things are degrading rapidly. So you're like, okay, if, if 1950 to 2000, or 60 to 2010 take your, you know, to 2008, take your pick of what our happy spot was. But we had a good half-century, at least in the developed West of unprecedented stability and prosperity and access to the tools for better living. And we did not get anywhere near it. We came up with Pokemon and Chia pets and, and, and American Idol.
I think actually we need our fallback plan, right? Is we actually need healthy tribalism at this point. And you know, based on race, that's not healthy? Based on religion? That's not healthy. Right. The only healthy tribalism I'm aware of is by a regional one: Where do you live? What's your watershed? Where does your food come from? Where do your kids learn? You know, like how do we do this thing? And I was just on the phone with some friends that live up in Nelson, British Columbia, which is arguably one of the raddest places for that kind of multi-generational community. And they've just been battling huge forest fires and that their insight was, “Oh, wow, all the, all the governmental agencies completely jumped the shark and failed. And it was the local community that pulled this off.” And even the cell phone companies in the midst of crisis, regional crisis, the cell phone companies flew people in and pulled all their equipment out of the cell phone towers cut off cell reception. So their equipment didn’t burn.
ELISE:
Oh my God.
JAMIE:
Insane, egregious. Like they were trying to control evacuation efforts for like single mothers with children who were left alone in cabins. And like, boom just pulled the plug because they didn't want their stuff to melt. And, and now our friends are considering like, “Oh, we actually need to run for council. We need to actually get six of us on a provincial council of 11 seats so that we can control what's happening. And we need to actually take this back for ourselves, because we've seen that government is incapable.” And it's the whole thing of like peacetime generals are bad at fighting wars, you know? And, and whether it's Ulysses Grant going into the Civil War or it's, or it's FDR going into World War II, or it's even what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, right?
The ones who get promoted in peacetime are explicitly not the people to be leading through times of crisis. They're bean counters. They're political as hell. They're tself-aggrandizing and self-promoting. They're not the people you want. And so our friends are actually now realizing, “Oh, we need to get active at the local grassroots level. And we need to start advocating positivity because the reality is is that the Koch brothers have been doing this for 30 or 40 years in funding, AstroTurf movements, Q-Anon is now doing this and penetrating school districts around the country and around the world. So like there are the the death eaters are already organizing to do this. What we actually need is we need good, homegrown humans realizing, Hey, agonistic liberalism it's sucks. It's slow, it's messy. But if we just give up our democratic and political processes, because they're supposedly corrupt and they've been gamed by the bad guys, the quote unquote.
That's on us, the system is still standing at least for now. And it's on us to get together and say, “Hey, you know, we live here, we give here.” And, and I think that, you know, that old, you know, Whole Foods bumper sticker of like, you know, “think globally, act locally.” You know, you can kind of tweak it a little bit. It's like “grieve globally and thrive locally,” you know, like take in the enormity of what's going on and feel it and let that, you know, keep our humanity right there, wide open, but then thrive locally because it is too late to be turning aircraft carriers away from, you know, big icebergs. We're going to hit everything in our path.
ELISE:
And, and I think that what we've learned, which is well put, is we had to stop giving our authority to other people, or other agencies, or the government, or assuming that other people, you know, yes, I think collectively we will, we will find ways forward. And so not suggesting that this is each man for himself, but that we have to stop assuming that it can be someone else's problem or that someone else is going to do this, this hard interpersonal work that's required for us. And the interpersonal work is required for sort of resiliency and that ability to sort of navigate saving versus savoring, which really is life.
So, I want to talk about the 10 suggestions, which I know sort of, you get into a conversation about psychedelics. And it's funny because I've done some psychedelics and you talk about how they can be, they can, it can be, or this was, has been my experience and amazing light switch moment and can deliver a lot of healing, profound healing in a very fast amount of time, but there's no like state of perfection, you're never done at the end of the day, like you're in this body on this planet. And like, you're not supposed to escape this. That's not the idea, right? It's something idea to live out there. I feel like amongst everything else that's going on, many of us are getting stuck and this we're getting stuck in our stories, and we're getting stuck in this pursuit of, listen, I love my therapist. I want my therapist to be my therapist forever. I hope I never outgrow therapy. That said, I think that we get, we're getting a little stuck as you, as you write, rather than waste all that time trying to get our heads above the clouds, let's look behind us and help some less fortunate people get their heads above water. So let's go through your list of 10 suggestions. if you're down. I have them. I don't expect you to remember them, but maybe you do remember, do you know them off the top of your head?
JAMIE:
Well, I mean, I, for sure know, I should know which, which two come first.
ELISE:
Okay. Take us away.
JAMIE:
Just, I mean, number, and again, just, just a little bit of framing. This is a riff on the 10 commandments, but the idea is like, “Hey everyone, you know, you're not the boss of me, right?” No, one's going to listen to top-down solutions. So these are 10 suggestions instead of 10 commandments. So the intention is just fun commentary on the kind of contemporary, Western personal growth, new age-y spiritual marketplace. So the first one is just do the obvious, and that, that is just intended as acounterpoint to all the obsession on biohacking, personal improvement, and neuro-porn. You know, so it's, it's sleep deeply move often, you know, eat well, grief fully, make love, get outside, you know, that's, that's kind of it, right? Like, like that, there's just some very, very straightforward things that have always been true, and that despite whatever supplement is being hawked or whatever, electrical headset or VR opportunity, that it all boils down to, you up-regulate some things, you down-regulate other things. And we have to keep on going. So the, and it doesn't cost a nickel to do the obvious. And, but what it does do is it saves us all that time and money and effort and focus to then deploy to pro-social, pro-human, you know, pro-planet projects that we might skip if we were just obsessing on the mirage of relentless personal improvement.
ELISE:
Yep. Two: Don't do stupid shit.
JAMIE:
Yeah. Yeah. So like, that's, that's the, that's the other side of breaking into the candy store at midnight, you know, like, like if we have access to all these peak experiences and all the things, and they always used to be kept under lock-and-key by lineage traditions. And, you know, and maybe now in our kind of democratic sensibilities were like, tear down this wall, you know, like we deserve access and, you know, and whether that's industrial-strength psychedelics, or crazy breathwork, or Tantra practices, or, you know, you name it right. To say nothing of like high-tech, biomedical interventions, but we have the capacity to do all of the things without restraint and, and we're not supposed to be shamed for any of it. Right. We're supposed to be allowed to indulge it all. And you're like, okay, great. But that just means don't fuck it up.
So don't end up in a cult, in a jail cell, in a body bag, in rehab, in divorce court, or in an institution. And sometimes those things happen for other life reasons, but for the idea of pursuing ecstatic practices and accelerated personal growth. So just don't do stupid shit beause you give, you give, you know, an excuse to the prudes and the Puritans looking to lock it all down anyway. And you, you create a backlash against responsible use of these techniques. And I think that for me, you know, pursuing integrated peak states is, is closer to sort of NC-17, fifth-class rock climbing. You're teaching that. You're like, it's not for kids, That's the NC 17 part, and it's, and the falls can kill you, that's the rock climbing part. And like in Boulder where we used to live, right? There's the beautiful Boulder Creek path and you know, you wind past the the library and everything's nice.
And then you go up another mile. And the next thing you know, you are right next to multi-pitch rock climbs right outside of town. And there's no clear delineation. There's not a fence. There''s not a gate, there's not a skull and crossbones. But if you just suddenly started climbing up those rocks with no rope, no harness, no anchors, and no spot there, and you peel off to your death, people would be like, “You were an ass-hat, you shouldn't have done that.” And it, and this terrain is very much like that. It can be right next to suburbia. It can be right next to safe stuff, but these things can kill you and humble apprenticeship and leading and preparation are kind of non-negotiables if we're going to play in this space.
ELISE:
This third one is hard for me because I really want to understand, but let the mystery stay the mystery.
JAMIE:
Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that one is just the sense that people are having glimpses of the non-ordinary. Right. And they're coming back, story-telling monkeys, yammering their heads off thinking that the glimpse, the sliver they've seen, you know, the proverbial elephant or whatever it is, is the whole thing. And, you know, and, and my experience, I think Ken Kesey said it well, he said, he said, you know, “The answer is never the answer. “People think they found it and they stop looking. But the real thing is, is to let the mystery stay the mystery. Like he said, “Plant a garden where strange plants and, you know, and mysteries, bloom.” Like the point is to keep seeking. And there's such a temptation for people to get a hit of the numinous, some transcendent experience, but it's filtered through ego.
And especially if you loop it through the digital narcissism of Here I am on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or whatever, and I'm going to hold forth, like I actually know more than I do. And again, like the biohacking trap, it's an incredible time sink. You know, it just, you can spend the rest of your life yammering back and forth to other people about things we couldn't possibly apprehend and with more certainty than we should have. So if you just say, Hey, it is, you know, there are mysteries, dark and vast. And I have glimpsed a little bit. It's that whole thing of just letting the Burning Bush burn.
ELISE:
No, it does. We talked a bit about number four, which is 80/20, that how we spend, we sort of get, we can get 80% there. And then we spend you say 80% of our remaining energy chasing that pursuit of perfection or this idea that we're going to excavate, you know, our whole childhood and everything's going to be healed and we'll be, we'll be perfect. And that many of us who are more equipped than others at that point are just stuck on that treadmill rather than sort of looking behind us to figure out how to help other people, as you say, get their heads above water.
JAMIE:
Yeah. Well, and there's also something that you mentioned earlier, right? Which is, you know, it's, it's the Pareto split 80/20 thing, but it's also really, it's really confusing and disorienting because our first 20% of our tiptoeing into these realms, you know, our first breath work, our first trauma release, our first psychedelic therapy session, our first, whatever right, is typically it's novel. It's the first time we've ever done it. And it usually knocks our socks off if it's halfway functional. So that's where we get the 80% of our return, our ROI on our first dipping our toe in. But we don't know that the Pareto Principle is in effect, we think this is linear. So we're like 80% from that tiny effort? If I then do it for the next year or the next decade, I will be enlightened, whole-healed, Jedi, whatever, in no time.
But it doesn't happen. You get these rapidly diminishing returns. And this is, I mean, explicitly true on the psychedelic studies, right? They do one to three sessions and there, and people are reporting, “Hey, I'm completely healed and cured of PTSD.” All those kinds of things, very, very few cases is that actually true over the longterm. And God bless them. I mean, I'm not, I'm completely supportive of people finding positive, healthy relief for trauma and all those kinds of things. And I have a huge amount of respect for many of our colleagues conducting that research at Johns Hopkins or with MAPS and elsewhere, and, you know, kind of not calling bullshit on the situation, but just definitely putting an asterisk by those truth claims, which is, which is, you know, a year later, three years later, people are back in the human predicament and, and it's so essential that we balance our interventions with, with just integrated approaches to life versus hoping for one and done fix it.
ELISE:
I mean, your next one is: “Fuck your journey. So stop being a carpetbagger of catharsis, rehashing your breakdowns and breakthroughs. Show us how much you've grown.” Which I kind of, I also appreciate, I mean, I can get stuck and I think we all get stuck right in the catharsis of our own stories and hearing each other's stories and witnessing other people's stories is really important. And then, you gotta, you gotta move, right. You can't stay stuck. It's like you can't process for the rest of your life. You have to, you know, make new new traumas to process. Just kidding. But, but you do have to, we can get stuck. We can get sort of in an eddy.
JAMIE:
We sort of collect those experiences. And I, and I think, you know, ages ago, I think I had, you know, ran into my first friend who had gone through a lot of therapy in their own life. And, and I didn't, but I didn't know that, and I hadn't experienced it. I was, you know, just kind of young and in grad school. And I was like, wow, they're so open. They're so reflective. They're so thoughtful. That was my first experience of it. But then I, you know, over a year or two and you're like, oh, these are your stories you've already rehashed and rehearsed on a couch someplace. You're trotting them out again, this isn't like a new, fresh insight that we're having together. This is something you've workshopped, you know, and that sense of the carpetbagger idea. Then we carry along our precious gems of insight.
And there's a sort of performative vulnerability to the whole thing of like, I'm oversharing. And I'm telling you that inner reaches of my soul, but it's dead language. It's not fresh and alive, you know? And, and then that sort of becomes the, you know, the, the counter point to letting you know, to not letting the mystery stay the mystery. Like on the one hand, we presume to map the universe, and we're also sharing all of our most profound breakthroughs, and just at the drop of a hat, talking about them versus being in the actual real moment together.
ELISE:
Yeah. And then this one is also obviously related: “Do the hard thing. If you're focusing on peak states, which often feel easy and effortless, you may get tricked into thinking that's how it should be all the time, but that's not how it works.” And this goes to what we've been talking about. Like you're still in your body, you're still in your, your meat suit.
JAMIE:
Yeah. I mean, look, if you go with the flow all the time, you ended up in the gutter.
ELISE:
And then washed out to sea here in California.
JAMIE:
I mean, there's just no question. I mean, I have, I have a dear friend who has, you know, and he was actually in college was one of my best cynics. Cause like, I'd be like cynical and like dismantling reality and be like, this sucks and society is worthless and he'd be like, Hey man, he was kind of my like groovy deadhead Quaker friend and bless his heart. Right. Let him into an absolutely terrible marriage, a completely shitty job situation and he's about to do it all again in his next relationship. And I was just like, dude, you know, like, like you're going with the flow, your choosing to look on the bright side of everything, can actually repress shadow and then paradoxically create more of it. And so that notion of, of doing the hard thing is actually the kind of stoicism 101.
If you're thinking three steps ahead, and you're always doing the hardest, least pleasurable thing, then paradoxically things get actually much easier, more reliably, you know? So I would, I would take, you know, I would take a mountain guide over a, over a deadhead any day, you know, because, because there's that thinking of like, where's the next tight spot. And if we can think ahead with time and options, then we can solve those things gracefully. And then interestingly, your life does become almost magical. You arrive just in time, the sun is setting, everything's in the right place at the right time, you know, or like even like back country skiing life. You're like, Hmm, we get up before when it's dark and cold, we'll get to the top. And the snow is perfect. If we wait, cause we're hung over from the night before and we get there late and you get trapped in an avalanche. It's that kind of temporal awareness and a willingness to, to look to the next crux or hard thing, solve it ahead of time, that clears the lane for a truly graceful life. But if we're just kind of closing our eyes and taking our hands off the steering wheel, you can end up in a ditch.
ELISE:
Yeah. And if you think about that on the sort of a meta global level, maybe what we're currently going through will be enough and we'll provoke enough anxiety and feel uncomfortable enough that we'll decide to be a bit more proactive as we—not that it will be enough, but let's, let's hope that we will find a way to engineer our way out of the tight spots that we're coming to. And we just needed, we needed it to be put back in our bodies.
Number seven, we've talked about this a little one too. “Never lose the one. You can go anywhere you want and think anything you want, as long as you can make it back to the last known point of consensus reality. The one. Be sure to stick the landing.” Is how you, you and that one, which I think again, going to cults and whatnot, like people sort of spin out, right? Like they… it's all making sense. And then suddenly they're like, how did I get here? I am far afield.
JAMIE:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, again, you know, I, I just have like, I'm a simple lad and I tend to have very physical, like metaphors that will let you know. I'm like, oh, if that involving rock climbing involving mountains and oceans, you know, and I feel like gravity doesn't lie. So in those situations, right, if you're, if you're in a, if you're going into the backcountry from a ski area, like you're riding the lift, you got a ticket and there's little signs and everything safe. And then you go through that gate into the backcountry, right? And then you have to shoot your compass pairings, right? You don't even, you can go anywhere you want in that wide open space. It looks just like this other place, but it can kill you. Right. And, and you can go anywhere you want, as long as you can shoot your compass bearings, and then reverse them and still make it back to that gate, then you're not lost.
Right. Or you can go out that gate and be like, oh I, so there's rad Red Bull video. And here we are coming, we turn to my GoPro, bro. And you know, and you you're playing out there, but you have no idea what you're doing or the consequences, or how to get back to solid ground. And so when people are having non-ordinary state experiences and I mean, psychedelics are an obvious, easy example, but it could be intensive meditation. It could be breath work. It could be group or therapeutic work. And they’re starting to have recurring state experiences. They often get completely unmoored on what are their truth claims. And they get hijacked by magical thinking and they can't connect it right back to, you know, common consensual discourse. And then at that point you can just make up anything you fucking want. And it's kind of like what, you know, and I'm sure we're all having experiences of people we know and love getting hijacked by whack-ass stuff these days, you know. Like even people super close to us and you're like, “Wait, I thought I knew you. I thought I understood where your value systems were, what your predominant conclusions were. And like, how did you get way the hell over there?” And that's kind of where we are. Right?
ELISE:
And then you say: “And it's not that either. You can no more become fully enlightened than you can become fully educated. So take your insights for what they are, integrate them, and keep going.” And we were talking about this a bit with the generational gaps of, and keep, let the mystery say the mystery, right? Like there's just, we will never be at the end of learning and understanding.
JAMIE:
Yeah. And I think this one is specifically just to kind of like counterbalance the dopamine hit of a Eureka experience. And again, whether it's the 80/20, of like, I found the new modality or healing thing-a-mejigger, or whatever it's going to be, and obsessing on it, or the teacher, or the whatever. And you're like, nah, probably not. Right. Or it's some philosophical insight. And again, I mean, we get this massive salience burst, you know, whether the neurochemistry is irrelevant, but it could be like a huge gamma wave, integrative insight you squirt of dopamine like novelty and salient. You're like, yes, yes, yes this thing. And it's overwhelmingly compelling. But the reality is, is no matter how sweet that honeymoon is, it can and must fade, otherwise it just becomes mania. And, and we should always just kind of be like, oh yeah, let it come. Let it go. You know, and keep going.
So, I mean, it's the, you know, the classic old Zen thing of the student has some breakthrough can show experience or whatever, and the teachers is like yep, yep, yep. Let me as a quick few clarifying questions. See where you are on that. And now go pick up the broom, chop wood, carry water, back to your mat, and don't think you're special cupcake, you know. And, and, and let it all come and let it go. And that's, I think is just a generally good thing to God against any kind of inflation or attachment.
ELISE:
Beginner's mind. I love nine is I thin,k my favorite: “Practice resurrection. What if we practice dying to our stories, our pain and our pleasure, dying to our rightness or wrongness dying every moment and living into the deep. Now it's a radical practice.” I love that. I, you know, and I think so much of life is right now, it's this rejection, we live in this fear and rejection of death and an unwillingness to let the cycle complete and the cycle will. And it's instead, it's like, we're trying to stay on that to the right and up, to the right and up, to the right and up, and sort of the moments that Joseph Campbell quote of like, only, I do not have your memory for pulling quotes, but essentially it's joy is only available to those who are willing to sort of contemplate their death. Like you can't really live until you die. That is not a Joseph Campbell quote, but I'm telling you that’s what he was suggesting, but I love this. I think it's like, that's where the fluidity comes and that's where we learn sort of flexibility and resilience and lose our fear.
JAMIE:
Yeah. And, and, and full hat tip that, that, that phrase is Wendell Berry. And he ends his Mad Farmers Manifesto poem, which anybody should read these days. If you want to go back, I think you read it in this road, in the seventies, on an old typewriter, in his cabin, in his hometown of Kentucky, like he left New York, he went to do his farmer thing and he wrote this poem and it's just super, super relevant today right now. But it ends with that line: Practice resurrection. And on the one hand, it's very psychoactive. You're like, what on earth does that even mean? And then you kind of mull it and you can kind of come up with some of the variations that you were just describing, but I am continually humbled by what it actually feels like, which is, which is that if it feels easy, if it feels familiar, if it even feels voluntary, you're probably not actually dying to your story, to your pleasure to your pain, to your assumptions, to your safety, to your, you know, your identity to whatever it might be. Every time it it's actually a death practice. You are white knuckling it and screaming and resisting, and it feels awful until you can make it through without flinching. So just, you know, fair warning.
It's, it's a poet, it's a poetic phrase, and I believe it is directionally accurate, but built into the definition. It is never fun or easy.
ELISE:
It's never fun or easy, but it is literally life, right? Like life will bring you to your knees again and again and again, and we have been fed this mythology that that's not really how it happens or that you can transcend that, or you can avoid these really harsh transitions where you need to remake your life or your understanding of reality based on whether it's job loss, divorce, death, diagnosis, like these things happen all the time to all of us in a way that we, we typically, it's almost like we're delusional about the fact that we're in constant resurrection and many of us fight it. But I do think when you can allow it, it is, and understand it as a harsh gift. That's really the only way to grow. So the final one above all, be kind.
JAMIE:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we can talk about fancy waistcoats and clever diagrams all day long, you know, but I think, I think there is some front porch, grandma rocking chair wisdom that we shouldn't forget and, and no matter how sophisticated and polysyllabic we get, let's remember to have fun and let's remember to be good to each other.
ELISE:
This is not in your book, but this spiritual teacher of mine who I adore, who's kind of wild, not culty, but wild, but she said this thing, which I carry with me everywhere, which is: “Your vibration, which already we're in sort of new age territory, but your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it.” And I feel like that's sort of what we're all collectively being called to do. Like we've created with our godlike technologies to go back to E.O. Wilson, a situation that we can't manage. And it's on all of us to sort of clamber up, to figure out how to, to get up high enough without losing our seats, but to be able to sort of to manage it. I love that quote. And I think about it just in my personal life all the time.
JAMIE:
Yeah. That's great. I mean that, that's a sort of over-proven understate kind of thing, you know, like, like, like definitely let's get up there and then let's create beauty, that is well well-structured and durable from a place of insight, inspiration, and service.
ELISE:
That was a lot, and there's a ton more that we didn't even get to within his book, which I highly recommend: Recapture the Rapture. There's a really fascinating conversation about dopamine and other hormones and the ways in which they make us more aggressive, etcetera. So if you want, he does do a really deep, we touched on it, but a pretty deep dive into sort of what's happening in terms of the divisions that feel so fraught between many of us. And again, I maintain, I know that there, we have so many more things in common than not, and that a lot of the divisions are in some ways kind of a projected fantasy, that if we can figure out how to bridge, we'll be better off for it. But I love sort of where he ends, which is with this antidote to nihilism.
And he talks about within the book, he talks a bit about Elaine Pagels who is one of my heroes. Who's a history of religion scholar at Princeton. She wrote the Gnostic Gospels. And for those of you who have listened to my podcast interviews over time, you'll know that those gospels, which were sort of thrown out or edited out of the canon as we know it today and buried in the desert and only found relatively recently are I think some of the most beautiful Gospels and the ones that really speak to this moment in time. I don't think it's a mystery as to why we would have found them now, when we really need them. But for example, The Gospel of Mary Magdalen really talks about how, what we need is inside each of us. And it's about not looking out there for answers, but finding them within, which is really it's funny because I feel like Jamie is he's called himself a cynic when he was younger, but certainly he has an, a critical eye or an open eye about sort of where we are at this moment in time with the tools that we have at our disposal to sort of explore these big questions of consciousness and what is, what is the meaning of life.
But I like when the book sort of goes into those spiritual spaces, because he doesn't get over his skis, he's still very grounded in sort of what's rational and provable in a way that I respect. But I think we got to do the ski run because we really need, at this moment in time, to find some deeper meaning and something that we can all sort of collectively not even believe in. Cause I don't like that word believe so much, but something that we can have faith in, some bigger construct that potentially can unite us as we think about some of these big problems facing us. And I like his exploration of that within the book and within this conversation. The mystery needs to remain the mystery. But I think when we start to engage with the bigger mystery, we start to recognize how much alike we all are.