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

by Steven Kotler

As Nietzsche said: “madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, political parties, nations and eras, it’s the rule.” And in ecstatic groups, it’s practically unavoidable.

“No one dances sober, unless he is insane.” —Cicero

Except, as Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson later noted,1 “in all probability . . . hocus pocus is nothing else but

a corruption of hoc est corpus (“this is the body”), [a] ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church.”

Thanks to accelerating developments in four fields—psychology, neurobiology, pharmacology, and technology; call them the “Four Forces of Ecstasis”—we’re getting greater access to and understanding of nonordinary states of consciousness.

We’ll meet the innovators and experts at the forefront of this movement, an unlikely collection of digital artists, consciousness hackers, sex therapists, and molecular chemists—to

Tolle dropped out of graduate school and spent the next two years homeless, mostly sitting on a park bench in central London. He passed the time in a state of near-constant bliss—a state of oneness with the universe—that, he maintains, persists to this day.

What Tolle is preaching is nothing less than the Gospel of STER. His core argument is that through the experience of selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness—his so-called “Power of Now”—we can dwell in a place of unlimited richness.

But all this started to change in the late 1950s, as the Beats’ passionate rebellion found its voice. “The Beat Generation was a vision that we had,”6 explained Jack Kerouac in Aftermath, “of a generation of crazy illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America . . . characters of a special spirituality . . . staring out the dead wall window of our civilization.” Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem7 Howl was a shout out that same window: a free-verse rant about the need to break loose from social constraint via direct, primal experience.

Esalen, the Big Sur, California–based institute that the New York Times once called the “Harvard of the Human Potential movement.”8

the path that led to Eckhart on Oprah was largely laid by Dick Price,10 Esalen’s cofounder and first director.

Shaken loose from his moorings, Price suffered a manic episode at a North Beach, San Francisco bar in 1956 and was hauled off for a three-month stint on an Army psych ward.

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.

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.”

As an early Esalen motto put it,12 ‘No one captures the flag.’”

Erhard, a self-educated car salesman from St. Louis, was drawn to personal development through his study of motivation. He quickly realized that many of the ideas of the human potential movement had applications beyond spiritual seeking. So Erhard repackaged an assortment of Esalen-inspired13 practices into a business-friendly format, creating EST, short for the Erhard Seminars Training. The seminar deliberately reproduced Price’s accidental transformation, engineering a “breakdown-to-breakthrough” experience via a series of marathon, fourteen-hour days, without food or breaks, and with lots of yelling and profanity—the fabled “EST

encounter.”

If you’ve ever hired a personal or executive coach (professions that didn’t exist before the late 1970’s), heard someone say they “just needed space,” been encouraged to “take a stand” or “make a difference,” or engaged in a journey of “transformation” around your “personal story”—you’ve come across terms coined or popularized by Erhard and his trainings.

While EST itself made an impact, with almost one million people going through those original seminars, Landmark, the latest incarnation of Erhard’s teachings, boasts corporate clients including Microsoft,14 NASA, Reebok, and Lululemon.

We hear echoes of these ideas everywhere, from Tony Robbins’s empowerment seminars to the prosperity theology preached every Sunday by megachurch ministers like Joel Osteen.

The human potential movement normalized the use of ecstatic practices for psychological growth.

Justine Dawson, the CEO of OneTaste and our host for the weekend, escorted us to our chairs in the front row of a packed auditorium, ascended the stage, dropped her pants, and lay back on a massage table.

OneTaste’s founder, Nicole Daedone, entered stage right. Wearing a gray wool dress and a large black apron, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves, dipped her forefinger and thumb into a jar of artisanal lube, and went to work. The reclined Dawson began mewling.

With an entertainer’s’ flair for the theatrical, Nicole paused, swiveled on a stilettoed black boot, and punched her hand in the air like a rock guitarist. The audience began calling out words to describe their own experience. “Tingling in my groin,” one woman announced. “Heat,” said another. “Tumescence,” blurted a software engineer. 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. A tightly circumscribed, almost ritualized practice, OMing involves stroking the upper left quadrant of a woman’s clitoris for exactly fifteen minutes without attac...

Yet, in 2015, OneTaste notched a placement on the Inc. 5000—an annual ranking of high-growth companies.

By Wade’s estimate, nearly 20 million Americans have had at least one encounter with boundary-dissolving, self-obliterating sex.

The uncertainty of teasing, as Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky established, spikes dopamine 400 percent. Nipple stimulation boosts oxytocin. Pressure in the throat or colon regulates the vagus nerve,23 creating exhilaration, intense relaxation, and goose bumps, what Princeton gastroenterologist Anish Sheth memorably terms poo-phoria. “To some it may feel like a religious experience,” Sheth writes, “to others like an orgasm, and to a lucky few like both.”

A 2013 Dutch study found that kinky sex24 practitioners “were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, and had higher subjective well-being.” Nor are these benefits reserved just for the socially progressive. Minister Ed Young25 of the mega–Fellowship Church in Dallas, Texas, exhorts his congregation of thousands to the “Seven Days of Sex” challenge, where they commit to sex every day for a week to deepen their spiritual union.

In the 1990s, Britton became interested in near-death experiences (NDEs),26 where subjects had transcendental encounters during life-threatening events (including the widely reported tunnel-of-light journey). Thirty years of research showed that people who had an NDE scored exceptionally high on tests of overall life satisfaction. As a trauma expert, Britton found this unusual.

In her experience, most people who came close to dying were scarred by the event, developing post-traumatic stress and other mental health conditions. But if those studies were right, then people who had a transcendent near-death experience were having a decidedly atypical response to trauma.

After recruiting twenty-three NDE’ers and twenty-three control subjects, she hooked them all up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines and ran a sleep study. Her goal was both to get a clear picture of brainwave activity and record how long it took her subjects to...

Britton discovered that NDEers delayed entry until 110 minutes—which meant that they were off the charts for happiness and life satisfaction.

And when Britton examined the EEG data, she discovered why: the brain-firing patterns of her subjects were completely altered. It was as if the NDE had instantly rewired their gray matter. Sure, it was only a single experiment, but it did suggest that even a one-time encounter with a powerful altered state could impart lasting change.

In 2011, Griffiths gave three grams of psilocybin to a group of terminal cancer patients, in an attempt to provide them with relief from fear-of-death anxiety (which is understandably hard to alleviate). Afterward, he administered a battery of psychological tests,

including a standard fear-of-dying metric, the Death Transcendence Scale, at one- and fourteen-month intervals. Just as with Britton’s NDE survivors, Griffiths found significant, sustained change: a marked decrease in their fear of death, and a significant uptick in their attitudes, moods, and behavior. Ninety-four percent of his subjects said taking psilocybin was one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives. Four out of ten said it was the most meaningful.

In 2012, psychologist Michael Mithoefer discovered that even a single dose28 of MDMA can reduce or cure post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in survivors of child abuse, sexual abuse, and combat. “It was completely cathartic,” reported an Army ranger who suffered a broken back and severe head trauma in Iraq. “The next day [after just one session] the nightmares were gone. I was glowing and extroverted for the first time since getting blown up. MDMA gave me my life back.”

In contrast, Mithoefer found that the benefits provided by one to three rounds of MDMA therapy lasts for years. These results outstrip conventional treatments so convincingly that, in May 2015, the federal government approved studies of MDMA as a treatment for depression and anxiety.

Flow researchers have achieved comparable results without drugs, simply by altering neurobiological function. In 2007, working with Iraq War veterans at Camp Pendleton, occupational therapist Carly Rogers of the University of California, Los Angeles blended surfing (a reliable flow trigger) and talk therapy into a treatment for PTSD. It was essentially the same protocol Mithoefer used, only with the flow generated by action sports substituting for MDMA.

recent study done by the military found that 84 percent of PTSD subjects who meditated for a month could reduce or even stop taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

Taken together, all this work—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.

In 1998, after being elected president of the American Psychological Association,31 Seligman made positive psychology the central focus of his tenure. “I want to remind our field that it has been side-tracked,” he wrote in his first Presidential Column for the APA’s newsletter. “Psychology is not just the study of weakness and damage, it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken, it is nurturing what is best within ourselves.”

Oddly, in the history of adult psychology, the idea that we could cultivate anything over time was considered suspect.

Right around middle age, for example, Kegan noticed that some people moved beyond generally well-adjusted adulthood, or what he called “Self-Authoring,” into a different stage entirely: “Self-Transforming.”

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. The move from self-authoring to self-transforming for example? Fewer than 5 percent of us ever make that jump.

But in all of this developmental research, buried in the footnotes33 about those self-transcending 5 percenters, lay a curious fact. A disproportionate number of them had dabbled in ecstasis: often beginning with psychedelics and, after that, making meditation, martial arts, and other state-shifting practices a central part of their lives.

In a survey of nearly five hundred managers in different industries, he found that 80 percent of those who scored in the upper two stages of development held senior management roles despite only making up 10 percent of the broader population. The most developed leaders, as Torbert noted in the Harvard Business Review, “succeeded in generating one or more organizational transformations over a four-year period, [and] their companies’ profitability, market share, and reputation all improved.”

By bridging the gap between peak states and personal growth,

altered states can lead to altered traits.

Not long after celebrities began showing up at gala events with implausibly blank expressions, researchers started to notice that Botox was doing more than just altering how people looked. It was altering how they felt, too. In study after study, when seriously depressed patients received Botox injections3 in their frown lines, they got significant and sometimes instantaneous relief from depression. But when Botoxed subjects were asked to empathize4 with other people, to feel their joy or share their sorrow, they simply couldn’t.

Our facial expressions are hardwired5 into our emotions: we can’t have one without the other. Botox lessens depression because it prevents us from making sad faces. But it also dampens our connection to those around us because we feel empathy by mimicking each other’s facial expressions. With Botox, mimicry becomes impossible, so we feel almost nothing at all.