Jamie Wheal on The Mindvalley Podcast

Like, we think of tools and we think of fire and we think of language as, like, the big things that we did to go from hairy apes to us. And the reality is, he's like, our sexuality has to be considered the fourth leg of that stool. Do we end up dancing on the strings of amoral evolution or social taboos and shame? Or can we untie those strings and learn to dance for ourselves? The world needs us at our best right now, and many of us are feeling at our worst. We're coming out of a couple of years of lockdown and isolation. We're dealing with all the uncertainties that we see in our news feeds, right? All the projections and reports of the coming decades. Like, we can't go into the feudal position. We need to get back to the better angels of our nature. And one of the most simple, powerful ways is by harnessing our actual bodies and brains to heal our hearts and minds. It lets us keep the crucible of our transformation on a simmer without boiling over and making a mess or getting so cold that all your pasta sticks together.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the mindvalley podcast. My guest today is Jamie Wheal, and if you haven't heard of Jamie, he is one of by far the most popular guest I have on this podcast. Jamie's new book is called Recapture the Rapture Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World that's Lost Its Mind. I've started reading the book, and this book absolutely hooks you. This is one of those books that you read because it's so darn entertaining. Very often, personal growth books are educational, yes, but this book is so absolutely entertaining, and it has you thinking about fascinating ideas long after you put it down. Now, I love having Jamie on the podcast because what he discusses shifts our way of thinking in remarkable ways. I'm going to give you. Give you an example in a moment. But first, for those of you who just tuned in, we're talking about the book Recapture the Rapture. You can read about it on Recapture the Rapture dot com. Today, we're going to be talking about a specific chapter of the book that I think is going to really hook you. It is chapter eight and nine, which is all about sex. Now, the subtitle of the book is is Basically Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World that's Lost Its Mind. And what I want you to know is that we're not just talking about sex. We're really talking about sex that is so rapturous that you literally die and connect With God, Jamie's going to go deeper into that. So once again, the website is Recapture the Rapture. If you're listening to this while you're on your computer, you might want to open up that website so you can bookmark that book and add it to your Amazon cart. Now let's do a quick intro on Jamie before I tell you why I love learning from this man. So Jamie, in addition to being the author of Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World that's Lost His Mind, is the global best selling author of one of my favorite books of all time, Stealing How Silicon Valley Navy Seals and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. That book, Stealing Fire influenced me so much, we launched an a fest on that topic. And we have everyone from Steven Kotler, the co author of the book, to Wim Hof speaking in Jamaica on the power of altered states. Altered states became a topic of massive fascination for me and it was partially sparked by this book, Stealing Fire, which came out a couple of years ago. Jamie is also an expert in peak performance and leadership, specializing in neuroanthropology, the intersection of culture, biology, and psychology. His most recent book, Recapture the Rapture Fellowship, focuses on the broader social problems of healing, believing, and belonging. So I'm really excited to have Jamie Wheel on the podcast today. Jamie, welcome back to mindvalley.

Great to be here, Vishen.

So, you know, I was telling the audience why I love having you on, because your work has influenced mindvalley in major ways. You know, the last time you came on the podcast, Jamie, do you remember what you spoke about?

No, what did we talk about?

What you spoke about is. It's fascinating. It is one of the most magnificent podcast interviews I did. But you spoke about Religion 2.0. You spoke about how, as a world is moving away from religion, we create religious experiences through events that bring people together. Events like Burning Man. And then you gave a formula which was really powerful. I know, because I took it down and I passed it to my team. And you gave a five step formula to plug into events to so the events create the most euphoric religious experience. Now, you said a couple of things in that formula that were fascinating. One was so some are obvious. Music, obviously music matters, right? Music, dancing. You mentioned sexual tension. Like there needs to be a sexual dance at these events. And the third thing you mentioned was really interesting breath work. Now, I would have thought one would say, well, bring in meditation. But no, you specifically said breath work. And so here's what happened? It took me several years, but I decided to incorporate breath work into my events after listening to you. Now, I couldn't do it immediately because the pandemic hit, but just two weeks ago we brought back a fest after a three year hiatus and I got Neeraj Naik of Soma Breathwork to do a breathwork session at the event. Now the results came in two days ago and that breathwork session which you sparked me to do was the highest rated session of the entire event. So you were dead on. So I wanted to just express my appreciation for your ideas that have actually infused itself into mindvalley and helped us in some way construct our event experiences.

Fantastic. Well, let me, let me, let me give you another one that I really care about because my sense is, is that in the instructional design, like what we're talking about is how do you create culture, even if it's a momentary one, like for an event or a conference and people. The other thing is how deep down into shadow do you go? Right, so breath work is neurophysiological state shift like that helps everybody get into the present moment and it may even give them access to some non ordinary information and inspiration. Fantastic. But the other piece, which many event designers are gun shy about because they don't want to get into the scary stuff. But without a doubt, the highest highs are fueled by, by a skillful descent into the lowest lows. So whatever you do in order to name the darkness, in order to explore shadow, that is actually your rocket fuel for your ascent into the celestial realms of communitas. Love that.

I love that. Your model of events, the five step model. I'm going to add what you just said to that. Reflect on it when it comes to our next event, which is Mindvalley University, that's happening in July in Tallinn. We're expecting 1,000 people to move here for three weeks.

How fantastic.

And so anyway, Jamie, thank you because like I said, your ideas have been mind blowing. Now let's talk about the topic for today. One of the key ideas, one of the most fascinating aspects of Recapture the Rapture is part two of the book. I mean, the book is fascinating overall, but I Love Part 2, which is called the Alchemist Cookbook. And you talk about respiration, embodiment, music, sacraments, and then sex part one and sex part two. Now we don't have time to cover the entire book, so I asked Jamie to dive into one chapter so that there's extreme value in this podcast. And today we're going to be talking about Sex. Jamie, would you like to begin?

Yeah, I mean, I think. And the reason there's part one and part two, like all the other. All the other sections just get a chapter each. But sexuality is so fraught and so problematic and so loaded in our lived experience. It really took two chapters to kind of snip all the wires to the bomb. And part of that bond, part of what gives it its charge and destructiveness, is just to realize three things. One is evolution is utterly amoral. All evolution cares about is propagating the most robust gene pool possible. That leads to war and rape and conquest. That leads to infidelities. That leads to jealousies. That leads to all of the human condition. From the Greeks and Helen of Troy, you know, to Shakespeare to Brangelina, to, you know, anything else we see, like all of our heartache and heartbreak is just a mismatch between our values as people, what we care about, who we care about, why we care, and evolution's relentless grinder of just saying, of just slamming people together to mix genes and create new hominids. So first realizing that, just realizing that so much of our grief and suffering in the world is derived from we are at odds with evolution's overriding impulse to procreate. The next is, is that humans are utterly exceptional in our sexuality. And we can't tell because we're sort of, you know, the old saying of, you know, you can't read the label from inside the jar, right? We're inside the jar of human sexuality. So we just assume it's completely normal in the animal kingdom, but it's not. And Jared diamond, who most folks will know, he was the Pulitzer Prize winning anthropologist who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel.

And lots of other things of all time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He also wrote another very interesting book called why Is Sex Fun? And in it he makes this really convincing case that in fact, out of, you know, 4,000 animal species in the animal kingdom, we are the only ones with delayed ovulation, copulation outside of estrus or in heat animals. And lot like permanent female breasts and hips, which are, you know, impedances to running and hunting and fleeing and all those kinds of things, but we have them extended male penis size, which against all other primates is asymmetrically outsized. And that. And the anthropological assumption is this is actually female mate selection, you know, so. And even female orgasm like these are very, very rare, highly unusual. And the very fact that we have recurring, elective recreational sex is an. A total anomaly in the animal kingdom. Terence McKenna the psychedelic philosopher famously advanced with his brother Dennis the idea of the stoned ape theory of human consciousness that I. That our sort of hunter gatherer, grandpa and grandma stumbled across some magic mushrooms on cow pies, ate them, and that, that is what brought us to higher consciousness, right? And it, you know, and they launched that back in the 90s. It kind of got dismissed. It's been getting dug back up and dusted off lately with kind of the psychedelic renaissance. But I think you can make an even more convincing case that it's the horn date. It's literally our sexuality that has created the prolonged states of neurochemical brain change that actually advanced and accelerated our development. Because again, Jared diamond says, he's like, we think of tools and we think of fire and we think of language as like the big things that we did to go from hairy apes to us. And the reality is he's like, our sexuality has to be considered the fourth leg of that stool. So. So step one is evolution is amoral, right? We shouldn't take it personally. We should understand that we are being danced on the strings of an indifferent set of evolutionary impulses. Humans are exceptional. We are absolutely the outliers in the entire animal kingdom. And if we recognize those two things, we can hotwire evolution for our own accelerated healing, inspiration and connection, AKA sexual fitness.

So what exactly is sexual fitness? And you also used the word sex, sexual yoga, earlier. Could you explain that?

Yeah, I mean, I would just sort of say sexual fitness would be the level up category, the kind of generic descriptor. And that is basically just saying for most, most of us, and I don't want to speak specifically for anybody, but I would say in general, we view sexuality as either an exclamation point on the end of a really good day, right? Or as a bargaining chip to bestow, or withhold, you know, in order to get other things, attention, clean dishes, mowed lawn, whatever, you know, a nice dinner, whatever it would be, right? So we use it as a. As a. As a social, relational bargaining chip, or we use it as a celebratory recreational bonus. And those are both totally fine. But it is just to say that, wow. If I waited to floss my teeth right, until my teeth were shiny bright and I was like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna give them an extra thing. If I waited to go to the gym for the one day that I feel on top of the world, right, we wouldn't floss our teeth very often, and we'd be, we'd be terribly out of shape, right? Instead we commit to those things not because of their. Their specific in the moment roi return. We commit to them because we believe that over time, the aggregate benefit is an important good part of health and balance and vitality. So the same with sexual fitness. Almost none of us have just that practice where we sort of bow onto the mat, where we use that circuitry in our system, which, by the way, the only reason that sexuality looms so strongly is like evolution laid all that cable, it laid our entire ecstatic nervous system circuitry based on the sexual impulse to procreate. Because if we didn't do it, we ceased to be here. Right? And there was no instruction manual for hundreds of thousands of years. And for all animals, too, right? There's no instruction manual. So Mother Nature threw the kitchen sink at incenting us to do these things. As a result, all other pleasurable circumstances and triggers all use that same train, those same train tracks. So sexual fitness, just by circulating, intensifying and discharging our sexual arousal system, creates huge amounts of health, vitality, trauma, relief and connection. And when you think you go back to the evolution as amoral and life's a bitch, and then we die, and we tend to hurt the ones we love the most, you know, and, like, trying to raise families is really hard. You just think of, like, how. How much of a burden just life is just doing the life thing. And you're like, oh, wow, you've got some magic bits. You know, women's. A woman's clitoris, for instance, has 8,000 nerve endings. It's the highest concentration of neurons anywhere in the human body. And it's less than 20 years that we've even had a functioning anatomical model of that organ. You're like, oh, my God, we don't even know anything about ourselves. And. Right.

I just do a talk by this by Amy killen. It's been 17 years since we have only 17 years since we have heard we've had an anatomically correct model of the clitoris. Yeah.

And meanwhile, we've got, like, space telescopes, you know, like, seeking the big Bang. And you're like, holy smokes. I think we're a little upside down here. But you're like, okay, look there. If we told a story about two little animals who can wander through the woods, right? And if they. If they figure it out together, they have two magic bits. And if they put their magic bits together, right, they create starlight, they can create neck snapping, white light, bliss, belonging, connection and meaning. You're like, who are those two little creatures? I want to get to know them. And that's us. And so the notion of sexual fitness is just basically to say, you know, just the concept of what would it be like if we committed to dedicated regular, daily through weekly through monthly sexual practice, not as an exclamation point on the end of a good day and not withheld or dispensed as a bargaining chip, but simply for the overall accrued benefits. And what does our life look like and feel like when we do do that? And that's the study that we conducted for the book.

Oh, that's amazing. So before I get to that study, I just want to reflect on something I heard recently. We had Marisa up here, the mind body hypnotherapist, speaking at a festival. And she did a very interesting session where she hypnotized the audience to get better orgasms. And before she put this hypnosis, and then she sends everyone back to their room to either make love to someone or basically self pleasure. Okay, Now APS is not hedonic in any way. It's a more spiritual thing. So most people are opting for self pleasure. But what was fascinating is I was talking to the audience and many people found just from this hypnosis, orgasms being 50 to 80% better, mind blowing orgasms. We had one couple who came to her and thanked us saying that they had never experienced an orgasm together. They still loved each other as a couple, but the woman had never experienced an orgasm with a husband. And finally it happened after this hypnosis. Point being, Marissa said, we have to, we have to take away the stigma against sex. And she gave a really profound example that sticks with me. She said, look, we spend so much money on skin creams. There are 64 different layers to your skin. Do you really think your damn skin cream is going to permeate all of those layers? You know what actually scientifically gives you good skin? Orgasms. So have lots of orgasms and you're going to be healthier and younger. But this leads to a question, Jamie. Why is there so much stigma around sex? Why is there so much guilt stigma even not just sex with a partner, but on masturbation as well? And how do we, what do we do about this?

Well, I mean, gosh, that's, that's an infinite question we could spend days on. But my sense was, and the reason, you know, kind of what I, the first chapter I talk about like chapter one on sexuality is just trying to, trying to deconstruct all that. Just trying to put it in like anthropological context. And so rather than. Because, I mean, look, I wasn't. I have no interest in being a Neo Tantra teacher. My partner and I don't have any interest in sort of like putting ourselves up on a. On a pedestal and selling workshops. We came to this reluctantly. It was like, oh, gosh. The bottom line is if you're a sincere student of biohacking and human optimization, you end up in one of two places. If you don't flinch in your research, you end up with sexy biohacking or nerdy kink. You just do. It's the way the human system works, if you don't shy away from it. And so when you realize that it's. That it's not that we should steer clear of these things because they're so loaded and so volatile, right? We should actually take that as a signal, like, where there's smoke, there's fire. Why are these things so loaded and volatile? It is precisely because they are so potent. So every society, every tribal culture, all the way to, you know, quote unquote civilized cultures, has had to tightly regulate sexuality in their. In their social system or nothing else gets done, right? You just end up with a bunch of fornicating bonobos. So take, for instance, right, the sort of the 19th century Mormons, right? They had rigorous prescriptions on all things ecstatic, right? They weren't even allowed to drink coffee and tea. They weren't allowed to do tobacco, although, funnily enough, there's a plant in the deserts of Utah called Mormon tea, and they used to break off the branches and chew them, and they're filled with ephedra. So it's basically the same raw ingredient as methamphetamine. So the Mormons were like, no coffee and no tobacco, but you can chew meth and you'll feel great. But they also had very strong sexual prescriptions because they were irrigating an entire desert. Their giant earthwork projects required everybody on point and focused and not literally dicking around. So when you think about it that way, you realize that everything from whose offspring is whose to what are we, are we paying attention to any kind of tribal coherence and organization at work, or are we off chasing boyfriends and girlfriends? Sexuality is so powerful, that evolutionary drive again, that any organizing system of humans had to put a lock on it, had to control that, otherwise nothing else would really get done. And I think that's arguably the root dynamic of which taboos, of which shame, of which repression, of which all the other things get built on top of.

Well, I think Another thing that happened was the fall of the Roman Empire. I'm reading a book right now called the Shortest History of Europe by John Hurst. Right. And if you go before, before 5th century, when the Roman Empire fell, the Greeks celebrated sex, the Romans celebrated sex. I mean, you've seen this very often in documentaries or TV shows about ancient Roman times. You've heard about Roman orgies and Greek orgies and things like that. Sex was celebrated, both straight sex and gay sex. But Emperor Constantine needed a way to unify the empire around a set of common Christian values. And what John Hurst explains is that Western society, which eventually gave birth to America and all other Western societies, had a very interesting relation to the nude body before and after the advent of Christianity. So there's naked and then there's nude, right? So nudes during Greek and Roman times were celebrated. That's why if you look at the Venus di Milo, she's nude. You look at David. David was a Renaissance representation of Greek sculpture, nude. But in between, during the Middle Ages, we went from nude to naked, and naked became a sin. If you look at medieval drawings of Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve are hiding their nakedness before God. The human body became something to be ashamed of. Shame became a way to collect alms for the church. And so that could be another reason why we in the Western world have this weird delusion towards sex. I mean, I'm of Indian origin. If you go to the jungles of India, you will see this beautiful tantric temples with carvings of people in. In acts of fornication. All of that was shut down by the Victorian British because they found it to offend their. Their Christian sensibilities. So I think that could be another reason why we have this weird, dogmatic idea that sex is bad, that sex is something you got to take slow, that people who go around having lots of sex are called players of sluts. And I think it's something that's very bad for our health and happiness.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, again, all. All that smoke just signals how powerful a force it is. So the question is, is do we end up dancing on the strings of amoral evolution or social taboos and shame, or can we untie those strings, right, and learn to dance for ourselves? And I think that's really fundamentally not just an empowering, pleasant, enjoyable project. Right. But it's also potentially essential psycho technology for us to manage all the stresses and uncertainties of the world we're in, because the world needs us at our best right now, and many of us are feeling at our worst. We're coming out of a couple of years of lockdown and isolation. We're dealing with all the uncertainties that we see in our news feeds, right? All the projections and reports of the coming decades, like we can't go into the feudal position and we can't collect.