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

by Steven Kotler

Consider a recent Jeep campaign,41 where they built mud bogs at county fairs. With thumping music and flashing lights amplifying the joyride, Jeep let fairgoers hop into one of their stationary rigs, floor the motors,

spin the tires, and send dirt flying. The novelty of the experience; the rapid shift in sensations; the lights, music, and cheering crowd, was all more than enough to trigger the brain’s pleasure machinery

Under those amped-up conditions, salience—that is, the attention paid to incoming stimuli—increases. But, with the prefrontal cortex down-regulated, most impulse control mechanisms go offline too. For people who aren’t used to this combination, the results can be expensive.

“Games are a multi-billion dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists42 and behavior psychologists to make them as addicting as possible,” Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country’s top addiction specialists, recently explained to Vice. “The

Video games raise dopamine to the same degree that sex does, and almost as much as

cocaine does. So this combo of adrenaline and dopamine are a potent one-two punch with regards to addiction.”

Once you understand what Lindstrom calls “buyology,” you can imprint unsuspecting consumers with all the pleasure-producing neurochemistry you can coax out of them.

“This comprehensive tracking of your behavior inside these worlds,”45 continues Kelly, “could be used to sell you things, to redirect your attention, to compile a history of your interests, to persuade you subliminally, to quantify your actions for self-improvement . . . and so on. If a smartphone is a surveillance device we voluntarily carry in our pocket, then VR will be a total surveillance state we voluntarily enter.”

When it comes to exploring consciousness, as Sasha Shulgin used to say,1 “there are no casual experiments.”

First identified back in the 1930s,2 “Jerusalem Syndrome” is a temporary fit of madness brought on by a visit to one of the world’s most sacred sites. It’s an overdose of spiritual awe, where historical significance and religious potency team up to overwhelm the unprepared. Occasionally, it afflicts people with preexisting mental conditions; mostly it hits people with devout religious beliefs. Every now and again, it fells average tourists.

It’s why Burning Man advises people to not make any life-changing decisions for at least a month following the event,3 and why online psychedelic message boards like Erowid are filled with advice like “Don’t believe everything you think.”

In 2009, Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger discovered that people4 with more dopamine in their systems are more likely to believe in secret conspiracies and alien abductions. They’re suffering from apophenia, “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidence,” and detecting patterns where others see none.

When the prefrontal cortex shuts down, impulse control,5 long-term planning, and critical reasoning faculties go offline, too.

Contemporary psychonauts have even coined a term10 for this persistent distortion: eschatothesia—the perception of the Eschaton, or the end of the world. “It is not necessarily the absolute ‘end of times,’” the Hyperspace Lexicon clarifies, “but can be a feeling of some huge event in the near future we are approaching, the end of an aeon, a marker in time after which nothing will be the same.”

In 2014, Ryan Holiday released a bestselling book12 on exactly this subject, The Obstacle Is the Way. It offered an update to the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius’s claim that “the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” And this is certainly true of the ecstatic way.

“we understand we are whole. We are one with the world.”16 That feeling is called “the rapture of the deep,” a euphoric high produced by alterations in the lungs’ gaseous chemistry, and it’s responsible for one in ten of all dive fatalities.

While ketamine is so benign it’s routinely used as an anesthetic for children and pregnant women, it has an underground reputation as “the heroin of psychedelics.” As Lilly discovered, it’s the utterly novel information it provides, not its chemistry, that’s so addicting.

After all this, Lilly came to one overarching conclusion: “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.”

“Buy the ticket, take the ride . . . and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well . . . maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion.”

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

In this equation, Time refers to the learning curve, or how long you need to invest in a particular technique until it can reliably produce the experience of STER. Reward refers to how well we retain the insights that arise and how consistently they drive positive change. Risk refers to the potential dangers. If there’s a chance that you could lose your life or your mind, that’s something to consider well in advance. Put them all together and you get an approximate Value for each pursuit.

A one-day session with MDMA produces a marked

decrease or abatement in symptoms, but you have to be willing to ingest an amphetamine to experience it. Five weeks of surfing—potentially less risky than a drug intervention—achieves a similar result, but entails learning a new sport in an unfamiliar and sometimes dangerous environment. Meanwhile, meditation—both simpler and safer than surfing—requires twelve weeks and offers a slightly lessened benefit. These three approaches produce a similar reward (relief from trauma), but they come with varying degrees of risk and investment of time.

The Bliss Point, as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Michael Moss describes in his book Salt, Sugar, Fat, is “the precise amount of sweetness [or saltiness or fattiness]—no more, no less—that makes food and drink most enjoyable.” And not surprisingly, ARISE was deeply interested in hacking the Bliss Point.

According to the National Institutes of Health, 74 percent of American men and 33 percent of children are now overweight or obese. Our Bliss Point got hacked, and it’s killing us.

“What is the best way to get into the zone?” then we need to add an additional concept

here—hedonic calendaring—which helps us figure out how often we should get into the zone. Hedonic calendaring provides a way

And for anyone interested, there’s a free downloadable Hedonic Calendaring PDF at www.stealingfirebook.com/downloads/

Step One: List everything you love to do (or that you’d like to do) that gets you out of your head. Action sports, yoga, live music, sex, brain stimulation, meditation, personal growth workshops, adventure travel, etc. This may seem simple, but if you consider the breadth of the Altered States Economy and the fact that we tend to compartmentalize the many different ways we modulate consciousness, putting it all down in one place can lend some fresh perspective.

Step Two: Use the Ecstasis Equation (Time X Reward/Risk) to rank this list for value. Think daily sun salutations versus an annual ultramarathon, or a ten-minute medi...

Step Three: Sort your activities int...

buckets: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Seasonally, and Annually. More intense experiences typically provide more information but they do so at a higher level of risk. So it makes sense to allow plenty of time for recovery and integration between those...

Step Four: Research shows we’re more likely to keep habits23 that are tied to cultural milestones. So connecting practices to preexisting traditions can make them easier to stick to. Daily? Link it to sunrise or sunset, dinners, or bedtime. Weekly? Make it your own contemporary TGIF or Sabbath observance. Monthly? Connect it to the lunar cycle or the first or last days of the calendar. Seasonal? Solstices, equinoxes, Christmas, Easter, July Fourth, and Halloween all work and often come with vacation days attached. Annual? Take your pick: birthdays, anniversaries, New Year’s, back to

school, whatever’s significant to you.

Step Five: Lastly, remember you’re playing with addictive neurochemistry and deeply rooted evolutionary drivers. So, as your practices start building momentum, how do you know if you’re pursuing a deliberate path or becoming a bliss junkie? Short answer? You don’t.

Ironically, the attempt to avoid suffering often creates more of it, leaving us susceptible to the most predictable trap of all: spiritual bypassing. “[It’s] a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices,”26 says John Welwood, the psychologist who coined the term, “to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”

Brené Brown, whose books and TED talks on the subject have resonated with massive audiences, explains it this way: “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.”

The Indian philosopher Nisargadatta summed up the dilemma well: “Love tells me I am everything. Wisdom tells me I am nothing.28

“[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 Japanese get at this same idea with the concept of wabi sabi30—or the ability to fi...

Just as old sailing wisdom favored “high and slow”—meaning that you pointed your boat as close to the eventual upwind destination as possible—we are steeped in a “high and slow” culture of relentless goal setting and linear forward progress. It’s why, in the United States, more than half of paid vacation days go unclaimed and we perversely brag about clocking 60–80-hour workweeks (even though our effectiveness drops after 50 hours). We valorize suffering and sacrifice, even when the victories they provide are hollow.

So, for now, the leading candidates to explain how our waking conscious self shuts off in nonordinary states are: transient hypofrontality, transient hyperconnectivity, default mode network interruption, and cortico-thalamic gating (Henri Bergson’s’ original idea, which Aldous Huxley popularized in The Doors of Perception).