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May 16 - May 24, 2020
The heart has about 40,000 neurons that play a central role in shaping emotion, perception, and decision making. The stomach and intestines complete this network, containing more than 500 million nerve cells, 100 million neurons, 30 different neurotransmitters, and 90 percent of the body’s supply of serotonin (one of the major neurochemicals responsible for mood and well-being).
someone gives you a cup of icy cold water8 to hold, then introduces you to a stranger, as researchers at Yale did, you’ll treat this newcomer with suspicion and rate them as colder and more distant on personality scales. But if they give you a cup of hot coffee and make the same introduction, trust comes more easily.
Once again, by examining the neurophysiological profile of these students, Berka was able to identify “emergent leaders”—those individuals who would have an outsize positive impact on the team and its decision making—in as little as thirty minutes.
Transformational leaders not only regulated their own nervous systems better than most; they also regulated other people’s.
What Newberg discovered is that extreme concentration can cause the right parietal lobe to shut down. “It’s an efficiency exchange,” he explains. “During ecstatic prayer or meditation, energy normally used for drawing the boundary of self gets reallocated for attention. When this happens, we can no longer distinguish self from other. At that moment, as far as the brain can tell, you are one with everything.”
By using virtual reality to force viewers to toggle perspective back and forth between two versions of themselves, he created a high-tech update to Abulafia’s meditation. And it worked. Almost instantaneously, study subjects could no longer tell their real selves from their simulated doppelgangers—no belief or practice required.
Abraham Maslow once famously said,22 “When all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways. The technical term for this is the Law of the Instrument. Give
Psychopharmacologists have spent the past few decades3 cataloguing the consciousness-altering techniques of animals in the wild and they have found plenty to document. Dogs lick toads for the buzz, horses go crazy for locoweed, goats gobble magic mushrooms, birds chew marijuana seeds, cats enjoy catnip, wallabies ravage poppy fields, reindeer indulge fly agaric mushrooms, baboons prefer iboga, sheep delight in hallucinogenic lichen, and elephants get drunk on fermented fruit
But the fact that drug use is as common in the jungles of the Amazon as it is on the streets of Los Angeles suggests that it serves a useful evolutionary purpose. Researchers have been pondering this for a while now, and have concluded that intoxication does play a powerful evolutionary role—“depatterning.”
These are the constraints of the botany of desire: geography and culture. Together, they have prevented us from fully expressing that “fourth evolutionary drive,” the irrepressible desire to seek nonordinary states of consciousness.
After his blockbuster pesticide, Dow gave Shulgin the freedom to pursue his own interests. Not surprisingly, he chose to focus on psychedelics, starting with mescaline, modifying the drug one atom at a time, and testing the results on himself.
Out of all these experiments, Shulgin is best known for resynthesizing MDMA, a compound first developed by German pharmaceutical company Merk in 1912, noticing it powerfully boosted empathy, and telling a few psychiatrist friends that it might have therapeutic potential. Those friends tried it out for themselves and were impressed with the results. They started using it with patients and those patients told their friends and pretty soon word hit the street of a love bomb in pill form and the Ecstasy craze was born.
“This is to neuroscience what the Higgs24 boson was to particle physics,” David Nutt told the Guardian. “We didn’t know how these profound effects were produced.
The other important discovery made by Carhart-Harris and his team involved the birth of new networks. The scans revealed that psychedelics created highly synchronized connections between far-flung areas of the brain, the kinds of linkages we don’t normally make. So
In the early 1990s, Strassman was searching for a naturally occurring substance in the human body that could prompt mystical states, which he hoped might provide a way to explain the epiphanies of Moses and so many other historical prophets.
And for action and adventure athletes seeking flow, risk serves this same function. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in the morning,” Samuel Johnson once remarked, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
To track how much music people listened to at home (on average, four and a half hours a day) and what happened while they listened, they rigged thirty homes with Sonos speakers, Apple watches, Nest cams and iBeacons. When tunes were playing, the distance between housemates decreased by 12 percent, while chances of cooking together increased by 33 percent, laughing together by 15 percent, inviting other people over by 85 percent, saying “I love you” by 18 percent, and, most tellingly, having sex by 37 percent.
Embodied cognition research shows that we become more flexible and resilient when we train our bodies and brains together, and in increasingly dynamic situations. It’s why the SEALs say “you don’t ever rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training” and then proceed to overtrain for every scenario possible.
In 2007, Elon Musk did just that, debuting an early prototype10 of his Tesla electric roadster at the event. He also came up with the ideas11 for both his renewable energy company SolarCity and his superfast transit system Hyperloop while on the playa. And true to the Burning Man principle of gifting, he gave both away. SolarCity went to his cousins; Hyperloop, published online in a white paper, was an offering to the world at large (that has since inspired two different companies).
For Hsieh, the festival has had such an impact that he’s built its ideas into the corporate culture of Zappos, reorganizing the company to make flipping “the hive switch” as easy as possible. Similarly, he’s also spearheaded the Downtown Project, an attempt to revitalize central Las Vegas with radical inclusion, interactive art, and other core elements of the festival.
Peter Thiel’s Sea-steading efforts or Tony Hsieh’s attempt to build a start-up city in Las Vegas. But a Burning Man permanent community would arguably be the most interesting and achievable manifestation of it.”
“Our town was destroyed and we were abandoned by our government and our leadership,” one Pearlington resident said, “but [Burners without Borders] came in and reminded us that even in all that devastation was the chance for art, for celebration and for community.”
“I’ve been amazed at the depth of interest,” Von Lila says. “[T]raditional organizations are realizing the limitations of top-down mobilization and are seriously studying how bottoms-up community mobilization—the core lessons of the Burning Man community—can be deployed in critical environments.”
Branson and MaiTai are taking this same approach to host the Carbon Warroom, a transnational organization35 dedicated to energy sustainability in the Caribbean, and the Blockchain Summit, an international consortium exploring socially beneficial applications for alternative currencies. By bringing the passionate and talented together to play and work, they’re charting a course toward a more innovative and sustainable future.
This new version, known as mindfulness-based stress reduction, is gaining traction in places that would never have embraced earlier variants. Eighteen million Americans now have a regular practice,38 and, by the end of 2017, 44 percent of all U.S. companies will offer mindfulness39 training to employees. Since rolling out their program, Aetna estimates40 that it’s saved $2,000 per employee in health-care costs, and gained $3,000 per employee in productivity.
Consider yoga. This five-thousand-year-old tradition was a countercultural pastime until the 1990s. But once researchers began finding the practice did everything44 from improve cognitive function to decrease blood pressure, the general public started to cross the chasm. As of 2015, some 36 million Americans have a regular practice.
Whether we’re examining psychedelics like LSD or empathogens like MDMA, mind-altering drugs are more popular than at any other time in history. Thirty-two million Americans use psychedelics51 on a regular basis (that’s nearly one in ten) and report considered reasons for doing so.
There was a time and a place when this all happened, but it wasn’t the present day and it wasn’t the Black Rock Desert. The date was 1801; the place was Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The occasion was the Second Great Awakening, one of the largest spiritual revivals in American history.
In primates, Lilly had discovered6 that the pleasure system—what could be called the brain’s basic ecstatic circuitry—correlated directly with the sexual arousal network. Male monkeys trained to use his device for self-stimulation would choose to orgasm nonstop for sixteen hours, followed by eight hours of deep sleep, after which they would get right back to it. Pleasure, Lilly had discovered, was an endlessly motivating and potentially all-consuming pursuit (at least in males).
“Bottom line,” Calvert reported, “there was no discernible way to tell the difference between the ways subjects’ brains reacted to powerful brands35 and the way they reacted to religious icons and figures. . . . Clearly, our emotional engagement with powerful brands. . . . shares strong parallels with our feelings about religion.”
When the government came knocking, John Lilly demanded his ideas remain declassified. When Sasha Shulgin got that first hint of a DEA crackdown, he published all his pharmacological recipes. It’s there in the democratizing effects of Mickey Siegel’s consciousness-hacking meet-ups, it’s why OneTaste has built an Orgasmic Meditation app downloadable anywhere in the world, it’s what fuels the volunteers of the Burning Man diaspora. Open-sourcing ecstasis remains one of the best counterbalances to private and public coercion.
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.
So no matter what comes up, no matter how fantastical your experience, it helps to remember: It’s not about you. Take an encounter with selflessness for all the possibility it suggests, but fold those lessons back into your everyday roles and responsibilities.
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,”11 Bill Gates once said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten.” In bringing back ecstatic insights, it’s critical that we calibrate the difference between the reach-out-and-touch-it immediacy of the “deep now” with the frustratingly incremental unfolding of the day-to-day.
And that’s the problem that free diving shares with many other state-shifting techniques: return too soon, and you’ll always wonder if you could have gone deeper. Go too far, and you might not make it back.
If he was right, and there really are no limits to consciousness, then the point is not to keep going until we find it all, but to come back before we’ve lost it all. Because it really doesn’t matter what we find down there, out there, or up there, if we’re unable to bring it back to solid ground. So take it all in, but hold it loosely. And most critically, Don’t Dive Too Deep.
But the final analysis is simple: are any of these pursuits worth the time, effort, and money we invest in them? Are we more energetic, empathetic, and ethical afterward? If not, they’re just distractions or diversions from our lives. “I care not a whit for a man’s religion,” Abraham Lincoln once quipped, “unless his dog is the better for it.” And that goes double for techniques of ecstasy.
For virtually all of evolutionary history, salts, sugars and fats were rare and precious. The only time we encountered sweetness was in the few weeks of berry season or the lucky find of a honeycomb. The phrase “worth his salt” refers to the days of Rome, when soldiers were paid in this essential mineral. And fat—concentrated, delicious calories—was only available in nuts, oils, and meats. This is why, when we encounter a bacon cheeseburger sandwiched between two Krispy Kreme donuts, we lose our minds.
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.”
Critical filters are down, pattern recognition is up. We make connections faster than we normally do. But within all that wisdom, there’s a common tendency to be confronted by the hard truths we’ve been trying to ignore. “[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.
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