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October 9 - October 17, 2018
Trained meditators like Tibetan monks can put themselves into a transcendental state, and the machine will record their profile. Soon, as the technology matures, a novice will be able to put on the device and use these biomarkers to steer toward the same experience.
while heroin is so destructive it claims the number-two slot, it still couldn’t beat out the number-one scourge: alcohol. And tobacco—another legal staple of modern life—clocked in at number six, two ahead of marijuana, and just behind cocaine and methamphetamine.
Because these substances drive us forward, they continue to sit inside society’s perimeter fence, and never mind the evidence.
During ecstasis, our sense of being an individual “I” gets replaced by the feeling of being a collective “we.”
But it’s a double-edged sword. When we lose ourselves and merge with the group, we are in danger of losing too much of ourselves.
altered states don’t just make us feel better for a moment, they can actually further our development over a lifetime.
Price’s realization—the idea that we sometimes have to “break down to breakthrough”—quickly became a mainstay of the human potential movement.
On the OneTaste website, they describe their central practice as OMing,15 short for “orgasmic meditation,” and we’d just witnessed a mainstage demonstration by the masters.
“The fact is, sex—all by itself,” she writes in her book Transcendent Sex, “can trigger states identical to those attained by spiritual adepts of all traditions.”
full-spectrum sexuality contains many of the same triggers that produce STER through meditation, flow states, and psychedelic experiences.
even a one-time encounter with a powerful altered state could impart lasting change.
Mithoefer found that the benefits provided by one to three rounds of MDMA therapy lasts for years.
in May 2015, the federal government approved studies of MDMA as a treatment for depression and anxiety.
from the NDE studies to the cancer and trauma research to the flow and meditation programs—demonstrates that even brief moments spent outside ourselves produce positive impact, regardless of the mechanisms used to get there.
the history of psychology as one favoring remediation over transformation:
“Self-Transforming.” Defined by heightened empathy, an expanded capacity to hold differing and even conflicting perspectives, and a general flexibility in how you think of yourself, self-transforming is the developmental stage we tend to associate with wisdom (and Roger Martin’s Opposable
Many of them described their frequent access to non-ordinary states as the “turbo-button” for their development.
altered states can lead to altered traits.
changes in the body—freezing the face with a neurotoxin—were producing changes in the mind: the ability to feel sadness or empathy. The horse appeared to be steering the rider.
For those interested in shifting states, knowing that the body can drive the mind gives us a whole new set of knobs and levers with which to play.
We can shift posture, breathing, facial expressions, flexibility, and balance as a way to tune our states of consciousness, altered or otherwise.
our tics, twitches, and tone—reveal much more about our inner experience than words typically do.
But there’s also behavior—our movements and facial expressions. These have always been hard to assess and, typically, we could only get at them through subjective observations. Ellie gathers objective, high-quality data.”
And people prefer talking to Ellie14 than to actual humans. Even trained psychologists tend to judge. Ellie never does. In a 2014 study, the USC team discovered that patients were twice as likely to disclose personal information to her than to a human therapist.
If you think back to the embodied cognition work of Amy Cuddy, AI Ellie, and others, their big insight was that our bodies, facial expressions, posture, and voice all convey more information than we would ever suspect.
By measuring biometrics in the present, they were literally able to see into the murky depths of the future.
“During ecstatic prayer or meditation, energy normally used for drawing the boundary of self gets reallocated for attention. When this happens, we can no longer distinguish self from other. At that moment, as far as the brain can tell, you are one with everything.”
neurotheology—the application of the tools of modern brain science to the study of religious experience.
AI therapy proves that our subconscious expressions can reflect our inner state more accurately than we do.
By treating the mind like a dashboard, by treating different states of consciousness like apps to be judiciously deployed, we can bypass a lot of psychological storytelling and get results faster and, often, with less frustration.
But most of us, when challenged, will do none of these things. We’ll think more, talk more, and stress more. We’ll wait until after we feel better to go for that walk in the sun, rather than going for that walk in order to feel better. We’ll wait until after we get that job offer to pump our fists and stand tall, instead of the other way around.
we can stay above our storytelling mind and simply monitor the knobs and levers of our neurobiology.
When we consistently see more of “what is really happening,” we can liberate ourselves from the limitations of our psychology.
We can put our egos to better use, using them to modulate our neurobiology and with it, our experience. We can train our brains to find our minds.
different chemical compounds unlock different states (and with them, unique and novel information streams), these restrictions have limited our access to the “repatterning” benefits of different types of cognition.
the deactivation of key parts of the brain, what’s called transient hypofrontality, is largely responsible for selflessness.
“[S]ome people can reach transcendent26 states through meditation or similar trance-inducing techniques,” New York University neurologist Oliver Sacks once explained, “[b]ut drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand.”
Ecstasis only arises when attention is fully focused in the present moment.
Psychedelics overwhelm the senses with data, throwing so much information at us per second that paying attention to anything else becomes impossible.
Technology is bringing ecstasis to the masses, allowing us to taste it all, without having to risk it all.
The experience was less like listening to conventional music and more like getting pressure-washed with a sonic firehose. The bass hit our chests like a concussion grenade; the high notes made the hair on our necks stand up. And throughout the experience, there was no room for thinking at all.
MicroDoseVR, is an immersive VR game offering an atom’s-eye tour through many of Shulgin’s alphabetamine compounds.
by upgrading the tone to include a visual display, and adding in an EEG layer—so there’s neurofeedback to go along with the biofeedback—he can get whole groups of people to synchronize their heart rates and brainwaves and drive them into group flow.
Since Siegel was living in Silicon Valley, he was obliged to form a company, Consciousness Hacking,22 around these ideas. He, alongside Nichol Bradford and Jeffery Martin, also cofounded the Transformative Technology Conference23 and started organizing consciousness-hacking meet-ups.
“For the past three hundred years,” Siegel explains, “there has been a split between science and religion. But now we have the ability to investigate this domain and innovate around spirituality.
Flow Dojo— a training and research center25 explicitly designed to merge these technologies in one place.
start reverse-engineering the genome of peak performance states.
Whatever else can be said about the event, Burning Man holds the undisputed title as the world’s largest ecstatic trade show.
the experience of collective awareness, what he calls “the hive switch,” is the reason he attends. That “feeling of unity with the other people in the space, unity with the music and with one another . . . that’s why I go to Burning Man.”
What these examples make clear is that the perspective provided by nonordinary consciousness and culture offers a different path forward—a way to reconsider intractable challenges with fresh eyes.
