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

by Steven Kotler

Over the next two decades, Price and Murphy evolved this insight into a pragmatic philosophy. They took the best that organized religion had to offer, stripped out anything that was doctrinal or impractical, and placed a heavy emphasis on ecstatic experimentation. It was a “pragmatic culture of sensation and know-how,” notes author and modern religious historian Erik Davis11 in AfterBurn, “an essentially empirical approach to matters of the spirit that made tools more important than beliefs. Consciousness-altering techniques like meditation, biofeedback, yoga, ritual, isolation tanks, tantric sex, breathwork, martial arts, group dynamics and drugs were privileged over the claustrophobic structures of authority and belief that were seen to define conventional religion.”