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

by Steven Kotler

In more contemporary terms, the Eleusinian Mysteries were an elaborate nine-day ritual designed to strip away standard frames of reference, profoundly alter consciousness, and unlock a heightened level of insight. Specifically, the mysteries combined a number of state-changing techniques—fasting, singing, dancing, drumming, costumes, dramatic storytelling, physical exhaustion, and kykeon (the substance Alcibiades stole for his party)—to induce a cathartic experience of death, rebirth, and “divine inspiration.”

Mysteries persisted for more than two thousand years.

First, initiates kept the mystery in the Mystery—disclosing any of its secrets, as Alcibiades did, was a capital offense. And second, kykeon, that dark liquid at the heart of the ritual, packed one hell of a punch.

Typically, a rebel, seeker, or trickster steals fire from the gods. It can take the form of a potent celebratory rite, a heretical new scripture, an obscure spiritual practice, or a secret, state-changing technology. Whatever the case, the rebel sneaks the flame out of the temple and shares it with the world. It works. Things get exciting. Insights pile up. Then, inevitably, the party gets out of hand. The keepers of law and order—call them the priests—spot the hedonistic blaze, track down the thief, and shut down the show. And so it goes, until the next cycle begins.

The main problem was conflicting motivations. The people really good at

finding flow, mostly artists and athletes, were rarely interested in studying it. And the people interested in studying flow, primarily academics, were rarely good at finding it.

In their own ways, with differing languages, techniques, and applications, every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that altered states provide.

Put all these experiences together and it’s beginning to seem like a Promethean uprising.

upper range of human experience, arguably the most controversial and misunderstood territory in history.

“The alternative is unconsciousness,1 the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” —David Foster Wallace

The Greeks had a word3 for this merger that Davis quite liked—ecstasis—the act of “stepping beyond

oneself.” Davis had his own word as well. He called it “the switch,” the moment they stopped being separate men with lives and wives and things that matter. The moment they became, well, there’s no easy way to explain it—but something happened out there.

Plato described ecstasis as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence. Contemporary scientists have slightly different...

“More than any other skill,” he explains, “SEALs rely on this merger of consciousness. Being able to flip that switch—that’s the real secret to being a SEAL.”

that is, what it takes to get a SEAL ready for combat—total out to roughly $500,000 per head.

As it costs about $1 million a year7 to keep a frogman in the field, and these rotations take a couple of years to complete, add roughly another $2.5 million to the tally.

All in, those couple dozen men under Rich Davis’s command, the SEAL unit charged with capturing, not killing, Al-Wazu, were an exceptionally well-oiled $85 million machine.

Prevailing over this type of chaos requires an astounding level of cognitive dexterity.

“At every step of the training,” says Davis, “from the first day of BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs) through their last day in DEVGRU, we are weeding out candidates who cannot shift their consciousness and merge with the team.”

Does an operator, with his back against the wall, retreat into himself, or merge with his team? This is why they relentlessly emphasize “swim buddies” (the partner you can never leave behind, no matter what) in basic training.

“When SEALs sweep a building,” says Rich Davis, “slow is dangerous. We want to move as fast as possible. To do this, there are only two rules. The first is do the exact opposite of what the guy in front of you is doing—so if he looks left, then you look right. The second is trickier: the person who knows what to do next is the leader. We’re entirely nonhierarchical in that way. But in a combat environment, when split seconds make all the difference, there’s no time for second-guessing. When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It’s the only way we win.”

“dynamic subordination,”

The conscious mind is a potent tool, but it’s slow, and can manage only a small amount of information at once.

In ecstasis, the conscious mind takes a break, and the subconscious takes over. As this occurs, a number of performance-enhancing neurochemicals flood the system, including norepinephrine and dopamine. Both of these chemicals amplify focus, muscle reaction times, and pattern recognition. With

So, when a team enters hostile terrain, they can break complex threats into manageable chunks. They quickly segment the battle space into familiar situations they know how to handle, like guards that need disarming or civilians that need corralling, and unfamiliar situations—a murky shape in a far corner—that may or may not be a threat.

communal vocational ecstasy.”

So for them to acknowledge, as Commander Rich Davis did, that an altered state of consciousness was both essential to mission success and elusive as hell—something they had to screen for by attrition, but couldn’t train for by design? That

That’s because, any way you slice it, ecstasis doesn’t make a lot of sense. It remains a profound experience, a place far beyond our normal selves, what author Arthur C. Clarke called a “sufficiently advanced technology”—the kind that still looks like magic to us.

When we say ecstasis we’re talking about a very specific range of nonordinary states of consciousness (NOSC)21—what Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Stanislav Grof defined as those experiences “characterized by dramatic perceptual changes, intense and often unusual emotions, profound alterations in the thought processes and behavior, [brought about] by a variety of psychosomatic manifestations, rang[ing] from profound terror to ecstatic rapture . . . There exist many different forms of NOSC; they can be induced by a variety of different techniques or occur spontaneously, in the middle of everyday life.”

First, flow states, those “in-the-zone”

zone” moments including group flow, or what the SEALs experienced during the capture of Al-Wazu, and the Googlers harnessed in the desert. Second, contemplative and mystical states, where techniques like chanting, dance, meditation, sexuality, and, most recently, wearable technologies are used to shut off the self. Finally, psychedelic states, where the recent resurgence in sanctioned research is leading to some of the more intriguing pharmacological findings in several decades. Taken together, these three categories define our territory of ecstasis.

Regular waking consciousness has a predictable and consistent signature22 in the brain: widespread activity in the prefrontal cortex, brainwaves in the high-frequency beta range, and the steady drip, drip of stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol.

Instead of widespread activity in the prefrontal cortex, we see specific parts of this region either light up and become hyperactive or power down and become hypoactive.

At the same time, brainwaves slow from agitated beta to daydreamy alpha and deeper theta. Neurochemically, stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol are replaced by performance-enhancing, pleasure-producing compounds such as dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, serotonin, and oxytocin.

And this understanding allows us to tune altered states with newfound precision.

Instead of following the breath (or chanting a mantra

or puzzling out a koan), meditators can be hooked up to neurofeedback devices that steer the brain directly toward that alpha/theta range. It’s a fairly straightforward adjustment to electrical activity, but it can accelerate learning, letting practitioners achieve in months what used to take years.

They were sensory deprivation tanks, where users float in salt water in pitch blackness for hours at a time. Invented by National Institutes of Health researcher and neuroscientist John Lilly26 in the 1960s, these tanks were specifically designed to help people shut off the self (since the brain uses sensory inputs to help create our sense of self, by removing those inputs, you can dial down this sense). After Lilly began using these tanks to explore the effects of LSD and ketamine on consciousness, they fell out of favor with the establishment and devolved into a countercultural curiosity.

They’re deploying these upgrades for a practical purpose: accelerated learning. By using the tanks to eliminate all distraction, entrain specific brainwaves, and regulate heart rate frequency, the SEALs are able to cut the time it takes to learn a foreign language from six months to six weeks.

Put bluntly, we watch porn to get high, not to get laid.

Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky calls this priming the “magic of maybe.”

In 2016, the business consultancy Deloitte found that Americans are looking at their phones more than eight billion times a day. In a world where 67 percent of us admit to checking our status updates in the middle of the night, during sex, and before attending to basic biological needs like going to the bathroom, sleeping, or eating breakfast, we think it’s safe to assume that a good part of what we’re habitually doing online is more to forget ourselves for a moment than inform ourselves for the long haul.

But once we get past the narrative wrapping paper—what researchers call the “phenomenological reporting”—we find four signature characteristics underneath: Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness, or STER for short.

Trying to tease apart the consciousness-altering effects of meditation, for example, means wading through religious interpretations of what those states mean.

But the four categories we’ve zeroed in on are content neutral. They’re a strictly phenomenological description (how these states make us feel) rooted in shared neurobiology.

It’s experimental and experiential and we hope it can help simplify and integrate the ongoing conversation around altered

states.

Psychologist Robert Kegan,8 chair of adult development at Harvard, has a term for unzipping those costumes. He calls it “the subject-object shift” and argues that it’s the single most important move we can make to accelerate personal growth. For Kegan, our subjective selves are, quite simply, who we think we are. On the other hand, the “objects” are things we can look at, name, and talk about with some degree of objective distance. 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.

By stepping outside ourselves, we gain perspective. We become objectively aware of our costumes rather than subjectively fused with them. We realize we can take them off, discard those that are worn out or no longer fit, and even create new ones. That’s the paradox of selflessness—by periodically losing our minds we stand a better chance of finding ourselves.