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

by Steven Kotler

And when we can move from being subject to our identity to having some objective distance from it, we gain flexibility in how we respond to life and its challenges.

Conventional logic works really well for solving discrete problems with definite answers. But the “wicked problems” of today36 require more creative responses.

Price’s realization—the idea that we sometimes have to “break down to breakthrough”—quickly became a mainstay of the human potential movement. It’s one of the reasons we can now view Tolles’s park bench madness as a spiritual initiation rather than as a psychological meltdown.

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 Mind). But not everyone gets to be wise. While it usually takes three to five years for adults to move through a given stage of development, Kegan found that the further you go up that pyramid, the fewer people make it to the next stage.

altered states can lead to altered traits.

The ego is really just a network, and things like psychedelics, flow, and meditation compromise those connections. They literally dis-integrate the network.”