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

by Steven Kotler

The conscious mind is a potent tool, but it’s slow, and can manage only a small amount of information at once. The subconscious, meanwhile, is far more efficient. It can process more data in much shorter time frames. 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.

Norepinephrine and dopamine typically underpin “romantic love,” endorphins and oxytocin link mother to child and friend to friend, anandamide and serotonin deepen feelings of trust, openness, and intimacy. When combinations of these chemicals flow through groups at once, you get tighter bonds and heightened cooperation.

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.”

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. During the states we’re describing,23 this signature shifts markedly. 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.

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.

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. For a specialized unit deployed across five continents, shutting off the self to accelerate learning has become a strategic imperative.

“Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.” So we decided to take Drucker’s advice and follow the money.

Given that seven of the top twenty most-visited sites on the Web are porn sites, and that nearly 33 percent of all Internet searches are for terms related to sex, it’s safe to say that we’re sinking a ton of time and money into digital voyeurism. Unlike analog sex, viewing porn has no evolutionary payoff. So why do so many do it so often? Because, for a brief moment (and it really is brief—an average PornHub visit clocks in at seven and half minutes), we lose ourselves in a state of physiological arousal and neurochemical saturation. Put

We ended our study with what many of us know best these days: social media. What makes these online distractions so sticky is how effectively they prime our brains for reward (mainly the feel-good neurochemical dopamine).

Added all together, the Altered States Economy totals out to roughly $4 trillion a year.

We spend more on this than we do on maternity care, humanitarian aid, and K–12 education combined.”

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.

At the center of this complexity lies the prefrontal cortex, our most sophisticated piece of neuronal hardware. With this relatively recent evolutionary adaptation came a heightened degree of self-awareness, an ability to delay gratification, plan for the long term, reason through complex logic, and think about our thinking.

But all of this ingenuity came at a cost. No one built an off switch for the potent self-awareness that made it all possible.

This was Silva’s monologue too, but he stumbled onto a curious fact—altered states can silence the nag. They act as an off switch. In these states, we’re no longer trapped by our neurotic selves because the prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain generating that self, is no longer open for business.

That’s Kegan’s point. When we are reliably able to make the subject-object shift, as he points out in his book In Over Our Heads, “You start . . . constructing a world that is much more friendly to contradiction, to oppositeness, to being able to hold onto multiple systems of thinking. . . . This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.”

That’s the paradox of selflessness—by periodically losing our minds we stand a better chance of finding ourselves.

Bosses, colleagues, kids, and spouses all expect instant response to emails and texts. We never really get free of our digital leashes, even in bed or on vacation. Americans are now working longer hours with less vacations than any industrialized country in the world.

Without the ability to separate past from present from future, we’re plunged into an elongated present, what researchers describe as “the deep now.”

Energy normally used for temporal processing gets reallocated for focus and attention. We take in more data per second, and process it more quickly. When we’re processing more information faster, the moment seems to last longer—which explains why the “now” often elongates in altered states.

One in three Americans, for example, is obese15 or morbidly obese, even though we have access to better nutrition at lower cost than at any time in history.

“So many people find this so great and high20 an experience,” wrote psychologist Abraham Maslow in his book Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences, “that it justifies not only itself, but living itself.”

“In a culture supposedly ruled by the pursuit21 of money, power, prestige, and pleasure,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, “it is surprising to find certain people who sacrifice all those goals for no apparent reason. . . . By finding out why they are willing to give up material rewards for the elusive experience of performing enjoyable acts we . . . learn something that will allow us to make everyday life more meaningful.”

Effortlessness upends the “suffer now, redemption later” of the Protestant work ethic and replaces it with a far more powerful and enjoyable drive.

And besides simply increasing focus, these chemicals amp up the brain’s pattern recognition abilities,27 helping us find new links between all this incoming information.

Umwelt is the technical term34 for the sliver of the data stream that we normally apprehend. It’s the reality our senses can perceive. And all umwelts are not the same. Dogs hear whistles we cannot, sharks detect electromagnetic pulses, bees see ultraviolet light—while we remain oblivious.

In these states, we get upstream of our umwelt. We get access to increased data, heightened perception, and amplified connection. And this lets us see ecstasis for what it actually is: an information technology. Big Data for our minds.

If you want to train this kind of creativity and problem solving, what the research shows is that the either/or logic of normal consciousness is simply the wrong tool for the job.

Then, in 2009, psychologists at the University of North Carolina found that even four days of meditation produced significant improvement in attention, memory, vigilance, creativity, and cognitive flexibility.

And, as Ferriss explained on CNN,46 it wasn’t just the cofounder of Apple who made the leap. “The billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis. These are people who are trying to be very disruptive. They look at problems in the world and they try to ask entirely new questions.”

What he realized is that we are confined by a cultural assumption—call it the Pale of the Body—that ranks the stuff we are (biology) above the stuff we make (technology).

So whether we’re talking about students popping pills or shamans taking psychedelics, the bias is the same. It’s a question of effort. Studying all night for an exam takes work. Adderall feels like cheating. The same goes for grueling hours of drumming, chanting, and meditation versus the near-certain transformation produced by mind-altering plants.

“There is such a sense of authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures. We end up demonizing these compounds. Can you think of another area of science regarded as so dangerous and taboo that all research gets shut down for decades? It’s unprecedented in modern science.”

Consider Laurentian University neuroscientist Michael Persinger’s God Helmet.16 More than fifty years ago, researchers discovered that electrical stimulation of the right temporal lobe can produce visions of God,

But if we continue to insist that smart drugs and psychedelics are cheating, what happens as the boundaries between ourselves and our tools continue to blur? As technological upgrades and modifications to our inner state become increasingly common, what happens to the Pale of the Body when whole swatches of the populace begin finding God in the machine?

In very simple terms, the states of consciousness we prefer are those that reinforce established cultural values. We enshrine these states socially, economically, and legally. That is, we have state-sanctioned states of consciousness. Altered states that subvert these values are persecuted, while the people who enjoy them are marginalized.

“Winnebago methamphetamine and pharmaceutical amphetamine are kissing cousins. The difference between them boils down to one methyl-group that lets crank race a little faster across the blood-brain barrier and kick just a little harder. After that, meth breaks down fast into good old dextroamphetamine, the dominant salt in America’s ADHD and cram-study aid, Adderall.”

Which brings us to the final reason the Stealing Fire revolution has remained hidden from view: nearly every time we light out into this terrain, somebody gets lost. By definition, ecstasis makes for tricky navigation. The term means out of our heads and “out” isn’t always pleasant.

According to Fuhrer confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl, “the ‘Sieg Heil’34 used in political rallies was a direct copy of the technique used by American college football cheerleaders.

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.

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.

In the same way that Henry Ford realized his workers had to be able to afford one of his Model T’s for his company to thrive, Erhard understood that seekers needed to be financially successful enough to afford his next workshop. So he hitched the human potential movement to the wagon of the Protestant work ethic. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich replaced the Bhagavad Gita as seminal text. Mandalas were out. Vision boards were in.

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.

I've read about this study countless times. It's still amazing to me.

And their investment paid off. In a 2014 paper published in the Journal of Occupational Therapy, Rogers reported that after as little as five weeks in the waves, soldiers had a “clinically meaningful improvement in PTSD symptom severity and in depressive symptoms.”

A 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). In contrast, the control group—who didn’t meditate and stayed on antidepressants—experienced a 20 percent worsening in PTSD symptoms during that same period.

As Buddhist scholar Alan Watts put it, ‘Western scientists have an underlying assumption that normal is absolutely as good as it gets and that the exceptional is only for saints, that it is something that cannot be cultivated.’”

Fifty years ago, psychologist Abraham Maslow noticed34 that the more peak experiences a person had, the closer they came to self-actualization, his term for the upper stages of adult development.

There’s a bit of southern folk wisdom that says1 “you can’t read the label while you’re sitting inside the jar.” And that notion, that we can’t always understand what we’re too close to, sums up the relationship between psychology and neurobiology as forces for ecstasis.

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.