Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

by Steven Kotler

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.

hammer, turning everything around us into a psychological problem to beat on. Instead, we can stay above our storytelling mind and simply monitor the knobs and levers of our neurobiology. And while this may seem far-fetched, top performers are already there. Tibetan monks can shut off their default mode network28 (or inner mind chatter) almost at will, SEAL snipers tune their brainwaves to the alpha frequency29 before locking on to targets, extreme athletes smooth out their heart rhythms30 right before dropping into a mountain or wave. They’re deliberately doing an end run around their conscious minds. They’re accessing more efficient and effective ways of being, and they’re doing this exactly backward from how most of us have been taught.

Which brings us back to ecstasis. When we step beyond our conventional egos and experience the richness of altered states, it’s essential to upgrade our software. Those monkey-suit personas we thought were us (until we suddenly realize they aren’t) don’t need to confine us or define us. “To diagnose . . . yourself while in the midst of action31 requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events,” Harvard Business School professor Ron Heifetz maintains. “‘Getting on the balcony’ . . . [provides] the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”

And this is what moving from OS to UI delivers: a better view from the balcony. 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 neurobiolo...

One of Grof’s main arguments was that during psychedelic states, our ego defenses are so diminished that we gain nearly direct access to the unconscious.

Today we’re following Fermi’s lead, applying the power of Big Data to approximate answers to the Big Questions. One or two data points like a Moses or a Joseph Smith can’t ever make a trend, but what about a thousand data points? A hundred thousand? A picture is starting to emerge of the worlds inside us. And while it’s no less strange, it is arguably a good deal more accurate than the singular epiphanies that have come before.

And, if Siegel’s predictions are correct, we’ve barely scratched the surface. “Consciousness-hacking technology is going to become as dynamic, available, and ubiquitous as cell phones. Imagine what happens if we can use personal technology to shift these experiences on demand, to support and catalyze the most important changes we can make at scale. More and more it’s looking like we can retune the nervous system of the entire planet.”

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” —William Blake

In his seminal book37 Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore outlined exactly how new ideas gain traction. At first, when breakthroughs happen, only those people willing to tolerate the risk and uncertainty of a novel technology get on board, a trade they’ll make for the benefits of being “early adopters.” Then there’s a gap, what Moore called “the chasm,” that any idea has to cross to attract a growing audience. It’s attracting that “early majority” on the far side of the chasm that he feels is the true mark of disruptive innovation.

“In [George Orwell’s] 1984 . . . people are controlled by inflicting pain,” wrote NYU professor Neil Postman. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting47 pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that our fears will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” And while the possibility of a nation deliberately invading our minds to shape and control behavior may feel like a relic of Cold War paranoia, the prospect of multinational corporations deliberately tweaking our subconscious desires to sell us more stuff is already here.

Open-sourcing ecstasis remains one of the best counterbalances to private and public coercion.

When the prefrontal cortex shuts down, impulse control,5 long-term planning, and critical reasoning faculties go offline, too. We lose our checks and balances. Combine that with excessive dopamine telling us that the connections we’re making are radically important and must be immediately acted upon—that we’re radically important and must be listened to—and it’s not hard to imagine how this goes wrong.

As Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield6 reminds us, “after the ecstasy, the laundry.”

A surfer who in a flow state drops into a wave and strings together a series of moves he’s never pulled off before may need months of hard training to be able to reproduce them in a contest. An entrepreneur who glimpses a brilliant business model while dancing at a festival may need years to build the company that actually delivers on it. A musician who hears a fully formed symphony in her head during a meditation retreat could take the rest of her life to become skilled enough to actually play

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,”11 Bill Gates once said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten.”

And that’s the problem that free diving shares with many other state-shifting techniques: return too soon, and you’ll always wonder if you could have gone deeper. Go too far, and you might not make it back.

For those exploring nonordinary states, there’s a similar danger. You can stay down too long, amazed at what you’re discovering. You also can become enraptured by the deep.

“What one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.”

If he was right, and there really are no limits to consciousness, then the point is not to keep going until we find it all, but to come back before we’ve lost it all. Because it really doesn’t matter what we find down there, out there, or up there, if we’re unable to bring it back to solid ground. So take it all in, but hold it loosely. And most critically, Don’t Dive Too Deep.

This leaves us with four rules of thumb to carry into our exploration of these states. It’s not about you and it’s not about now help us balance ego inflation and time distortion. While don’t become a bliss junky and don’t dive too deep ensure that we don’t get s...

Those three parameters—risk, reward, and time—provide a way to compare nonordinary states. This sliding scale lets you assess otherwise-unrelated methods—from meditation to psychedelics to action sports, to any others you can think of. And you can distill these variables into an equation: Value = Time × Reward/Risk

“Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving27 up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

“Love tells me I am everything. Wisdom tells me I am nothing.28 And between these two banks, flows the river of my life.”

The love that “tells me I am everything” arises from the awe and connection that we often experience in these states. Endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin soothe our vigilance centers. We feel strong, safe, and secure. It’s a welcome relief, and healing for those who don’t often get to feel that way. The wisdom that “tells me I am nothing” springs from the information richness. Dopamine, anandamide, and norepinephrine turn the bitstream of consciousness into a flood. Critical filters are down, pattern recognition is up. We make connections faster than we normally do. But within all that wisdom, there’s a common tendency to be confronted by the hard truths we’ve been trying to ignore. “[Ecstasis] is absolutely ruthless and highly indifferent,”29 wrote John Lilly. “It teaches its lessons whether you like them or not.”

Every glimpse above the clouds can’t help but suggest work still to be done on the ground. That’s the resolution to the paradox of vulnerable strength. Ecstasis doesn’t absolve us of our humanity. It connects us to it. It’s in our brokenness, not in spite of our brokenness, that we discover what’s possible.

The ecstasy will always come with the agony—that’s the human condition. Nothing we do absolves us from the broke-open beauty of that journey. So there will be cracks. Thankfully, there will be always be cracks. Because, as Cohen reminds us, that’s where the light gets in.

The same is true for ecstasis. Research shows that these experiences lift us above normal awareness, and propel us further faster. Much of our conventional schooling, personal development, and professional training still miscalculate this fact. It’s hard to fathom how much faster we can go, how much more ground we can cover, if we can only appreciate what high performance now looks like.

We no longer have to rely on someone stealing fire for us. Finally, we can kindle that flame ourselves.