Jamie Wheal: how hippies took over the world (and why it sucks)

Here’s an interview I did with Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture and co-author of Stealing Fire. We talked about his life and work, and then got stuck into western spirituality and what’s wrong with it. Jamie was particularly interesting on how the global elite got into psychedelics, and why ‘all the worst people are taking all the best drugs’. How can spiritual culture go beyond self-absorption, and get into serving others? The full video is at the bottom.

We started by talking about his childhood in England, how he moved to Boulder, then eventually got into the Integral theory world of Ken Wilber:

It was the headmaster at a boarding school I was working at gave me one of Wilber’s books. I was in my early-to-mid-20s. And I remember thinking this is fantastic. This is a rigorous model that includes the subjective, that includes interior dimensions, all the things we were plunking around exploring and there weren’t a lot of credible roadmaps outside totally squishy new age stuff. Maybe 5–10 years later Wilber started the Integral Institute. I felt ‘wow, this seems to be an interesting group of people’, though I noticed a bifurcation of authentically switched-on folks, and then a bunch of intellectual wankers, on a contact high of being around Ken’s thinking, puffed up with the certainty of Ken’s conclusions. Julie, my partner, banned integral folks from coming over to dinner because they were such insufferable bores. They had no emotional intelligence and all they did was blather on from above the neck.

How Wilber disappointed him:

I spent my entire 20s looking for a Gandalf and a Dumbledore who can tell me what these experiences are that we’re having as accidental mystics, and being constantly disappointed by teachers and mentors who turned out not to be all that. With Ken, for the first time I felt like Lancelot willing to lay down his sword for King Arthur. I was like ‘this is the thing!’ And within months he completely shat the bed on a completely dysfunctional fiefdom. So it was sad and tragic in some respects but in other respects a complete blessing, because I didn’t hitch my wagon to that stuff.

On writing the 2017 best-seller Stealing Fire with Steven Kotler:

I had helped my co-author write his prior book for a year, and basically dumped out all my puzzle pieces on flow states and developmental theories. And we got cracking on another book and I’m like ‘I’m not going to do the Cyrano de Bergerac thing again. I helped you, you help me.’ Stealing Fire was 85% my life and my experiences, and it was my love letter to this hidden invisible lineage across time and space.

On hippies running the world:

One of the original impetuses for Stealing Fire was I found myself at the UN having a private dinner under Chatham House rules, with a bunch of people talking about cannabis legalisation, and then them all saying ‘see you on the Playa in three weeks’. Then I was on Necker Island with Richard Branson and that whole crew, and it was all these elite Alpha Burners. Then I found the same thing in Basel, and I was like, wait, what do Davos, the UN and Necker Island have to do with Burning Man? You’re getting this globally-distributed technomatic glitterati going on. This transnational hypermobile psychedelically-informed bunch of Alpha hippies pretty much running the world.

On his disillusionment with that scene:

That book came out in the early spring of 2017. That summer I saw a bunch of psychedelic Burners who’d done all the things, all the substances, all the personal growth workshops, all the things you would ever advocate and hope for the rest of humanity to heal and grow up. They were also running a nominal crypto transformational organisation to save the world. They shat the bed in such a thoroughly spectacular and self indulgent fashion over that summer. It was precursors of a lot of social justice stuff, but also a lot of entitlement stuff, and then off to the next party, then off to Burning Man, and it felt like a swarm of locusts. That was such a pronounced experience that I went into a bit of a depression that autumn. I thought, fuck if those people had access to all those things and they can’t even get to the starting line with their boots laced up. Then what?

Does the overlap between spirituality and extreme wealth tend to produce narcissism and self-absorption?

It always has. The worst people are taking all the best drugs. If you really want a psychedelic renaissance, the beautiful people don’t need any more. What we really should be doing is creating therapeutic interventions for doctors, nurses, farmers, firefighters…like, the people who have already committed their life to service to others. The bourgeois-bohemians it is almost to a one still all about them. They are seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, they just want the most pleasure and the least pain. It is still egoic seeking and virtue displaying and peacocking. It’s self-actualization, run into the ditch in overdrive, in all its bleakest forms. Every single long-standing religious tradition has explicit teachings about service to others. Self-actualization doesn’t.

On the altered states economy:

The most informative frame I’ve come across for it is Tim Woo’s Master-Switch book. His whole thing was any information technology starts out utopian and democratic and ends up hegemonic and centrally controlled. That includes bolt-on ecstatic technologies like psychedelic medicine. That appears to be what’s happening. It just is what it is. The question is what else might be happening. The underground will persist, as well as a resurgence or revival of psychedelic religions.

Daniel Schmachtenberger made a good case that wisdom has been captured in the marketplace. The people with the highest signals are not necessarily the wisest souls. If you look at who’s got the Instagram followers, who’s selling out arenas, who’s doing all the sexy workshops, is quite often the antithesis of Yoda. Because the saintly ones have no idea how to get a lot of likes and followers. Nor do they have any interest in it.

So there’s the inverse incentives of the digital landscape. And then there’s been a fracturing of monetisation strategies in the last five years in particular. Unless people are independently wealthy, like Tim Ferriss or Sam Harris, you need to find a way to make money. You can do supplements, you can sell high-margin shitty things, like Red Bull. Or you can rattle the tin cup — the Patreon / Substack thing, but then you can get captured by what your audience wants. We do the Robin Hood model — 90% of what we do is free, 10% we charge a premium. Every one of these strategies, there’s something that’s suboptimal about it. We’re all trying to find our way through differently. We’ve all got opinions on how everyone else is doing it. Does the business model we select support or thwart the integrity of our message?

How has the spiritual scene in the US done during the pandemic?

What I’ve seen is so disappointing that…I can’t keep saying yes to these parties because I’m not going to be kind. The mutation of the gospel of wealth, Secret / Law of Attraction stuff, plus multi-level marketing, plus psychedelic evolutionary elitism mutating into anti-vax stuff…is such a rat’s nest shitshow. But if you turn around and look at homegrown humans, regular people doing their best, there’s infinite amount of uplift, infinite confirmations of the human spirit. It’s just not in the leather and feather scene.

How new book Recapture the Rapture was inspired by time-travelling sex yoga:

This entire book came from the conducting of the experiments described in the book. We stumbled into these sets of protocols. And it disclosed through a series of iPhone messages over the span of five years exactly what this book was, including more of itself. So it was this recursive time-bending hyper-object, masquerading as narrative non-fiction. It was actually a backdoor random unintended mystical initiation into time-travelling sex magic.

There’s your blurb!

It’s fucking rad, and you can go there too. It is gob-smacking to enter reliably into some information layer and then bring it back and act on the contents. It was more like a sexual yoga. Body work, breathwork, gas assisted breathwork, cannabinoid, intranasal ketamine, oxygen, nitric oxide. How do you hack and optiumise a human nervous system, and take turns lobbing people into Zero G. And what do you see.

On religions, and agnostic Gnosticism:

I am an agnostic Gnostic. I continually have blow-your-doors-off experiences which I cherish and orient my life around. The agnostic side is I have no fucking idea what it means or where it comes from.

His search for elders / mentors:

I never found a Dumbledore, but I did find my life partner at 18. So I was blessed with a travelling companion. My frustrated search and having to build things from first principles is part of what’s been helpful about the road we’ve had to travel. Here’s the ways to navigate with a map and compass yourself.

Did you ever try to join a religion or movement?

Fuck no.

You write about still being drawn to Judeo-Christianity.

In non-ordinary states I often had experiences that felt Gnostic-Mystic-Christic., and didn’t know what to do with it because the branding of organized Christianity is so shitty. I was trapped on how to repatriate Christianity as a mythopoetics.

In terms of metaphysics / theology, you write about ‘accessing the Information Layer’, which sounds like a Silicon Valley sort of Divine, but also about being drawn to the sacrificial figure of Jesus. Is there a conflict between those two models of the divine?

To be clear, I only have passing reference to the Nazarene as a historical or scriptural figure. Going to a Catholic school, there were stations of the cross — Mel Gibson shit, gory, macabre, bleak. But there were beats of Jesus’ story that I found profoundly helpful. The temptation of Satan — the seduction of sidhis. The entire Passion, the idea that I’m really scared, stay awake with me. There is a mystic-Gnostic narrative in the Nazarene’s tale that is super-interesting. The core element is redemption songs. The idea of being broken open and prevailing. That’s profoundly human. Not some New Age bypassing perfectibility, but ‘right now it really sucks but do it anyway’.

Do your ecstatic experiences ever give you a sense of fear and trembling at the Divine?

For me, I’m fairly clear at this point that I have been asymmetrically blessed with more than a lifetime’s glimpses of the Numinous. The weak link is not going back to that wishing well, the weak link is how do I show up for my family and what do I do on Monday morning. My weak link is incredibly banal — being human in the world in the dog days of February. As far as being compelled to be a tourist of the Sublime in perpetuity, when there’ so much to be done in the here and now, that doesn’t seem to be tenable. Plus you’re also asking for it.