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

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

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In more contemporary terms, the Eleusinian Mysteries were an elaborate nine-day ritual designed to strip away standard frames of reference, profoundly alter consciousness, and unlock a heightened level of insight. Specifically, the mysteries combined a number of state-changing techniques—fasting, singing, dancing, drumming, costumes, dramatic storytelling, physical exhaustion, and kykeon (the substance Alcibiades stole for his party)—to induce a cathartic experience of death, rebirth, and “divine inspiration.”

“The alternative is unconsciousness,1 the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” —David Foster Wallace

Plato described ecstasis as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.

the ability to shut off the self and merge with the team is an exceptional and peculiar talent.

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.

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.” Out of this broader inventory, we focused on three specific categories. First, flow states, those “in-the-zone” moments including group flow, or what the SEALs experienced during the capture of Al-Wazu, and the Googlers harnessed in the desert. Second, contemplative and mystical states, where techniques like chanting, dance, meditation, sexuality, and, most recently, wearable technologies are used to shut off the self. Finally, psychedelic states, where the recent resurgence in sanctioned research is leading to some of the more intriguing pharmacological findings in several decades. Taken together, these three categories define our territory of ecstasis.

At the same time, brainwaves slow from agitated beta to daydreamy alpha and deeper theta. Neurochemically, stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol are replaced by performance-enhancing, pleasure-producing compounds such as dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, serotonin, and oxytocin.

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.

“A Buddhist monk experiencing satori while meditating in a cave, or a nuclear physicist having a breakthrough insight in the lab, or a fire spinner at Burning Man,” he says, “look like different experiences from the outside, but they feel similar from the inside. It’s a shared commonality, a bond linking all of us together. The ecstatic is a language without words that we all speak.”

Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness, or STER for short.

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. “[T]he self “is not an unmitigated blessing,”6 writes Duke University psychologist Mark Leary in his aptly titled book, The Curse of the Self. “It is single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species … [and] conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.” When you think about the billion-dollar industries that underpin the Altered States Economy, isn’t this what they’re built for? To shut off the self. To give us a few moments of relief from the voice in our heads.

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.

Without all the badgering, we get a real sense of peace. “This peacefulness may result from the fact,” continues Leary, that “without self-talk to stir up negative emotions, the mystical experience is free of tension.” And with tension out of the way, we often discover a better version of ourselves, more confident and clear.

with zippers. Psychologist Robert Kegan,8 chair of adult development at Harvard, has a term for unzipping those costumes. He calls it “the subject-object shift” and argues that it’s the single most important move we can make to accelerate personal growth. For Kegan, our subjective selves are, quite simply, who we think we are. On the other hand, the “objects” are things we can look at, name, and talk about with some degree of objective distance. And when we can move from being subject to our identity to having some objective distance from it, we gain flexibility in how we respond to life and its challenges.

This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.”

By stepping outside ourselves, we gain perspective. We become objectively aware of our costumes rather than subjectively fused with them. We realize we can take them off, discard those that are worn out or no longer fit, and even create new ones. That’s the paradox of selflessness—by periodically losing our minds we stand a better chance of finding ourselves.

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.

And when we do slow life down, we find the present is the only place in the timescape we get reliable data anyway. Our memories of the past are unstable and constantly subject to revision—like a picture-book honeymoon overwritten by a bitter divorce. “[M]emory distortions are basic14 and widespread in humans,” acknowledges cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, “and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune.” The past is less an archived library of what really happened, and more a fluid director’s commentary we’re constantly updating.

What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight.

“That was another thing I noticed,” says Silva, “when I go off on a tangent and the ideas start to flow, there’s no room for anything else. Definitely not for time. People who see my videos often ask how I can find all those connections between ideas. But the reason I can find them is simple: without time in the picture, I have all the time I need.”

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.

And when a Harvard Medical School study confronted patients17 with lifestyle-related diseases that would kill them if they didn’t alter their behavior (type 2 diabetes, smoking, atherosclerosis, etc.), 87 percent couldn’t avoid this sentence. Turns out, we’d rather die than change.

But just as the selflessness of an altered state can quiet our inner critic, and the timelessness lets us pause our hectic lives, a sense of effortlessness can propel us past the limits of our normal motivation.

In non-ordinary states, the information we receive can be so novel and intense that it feels like it’s coming from a source outside ourselves. But, by breaking down what’s going on in the brain, we start to see that what feels supernatural might just be super-natural: beyond our normal experience, for sure, but not beyond our actual capabilities.

And revealed is the right word. Conscious processing can only handle about 12033 bits of information at once. This isn’t much. Listening to another person speak can take almost 60 bits. If two people are talking, that’s it. We’ve maxed out our bandwidth. But if we remember that our unconscious processing can handle billions of bits at once, we don’t need to search outside ourselves to find a credible source for all that miraculous insight. We have terabytes of information available to us; we just can’t tap into it in our normal state.

First, creativity is essential for solving complex problems—the kinds we often face in a fast-paced world. Second, we have very little success training people to be more creative. And there’s a pretty simple explanation for this failure: we’re trying to train a skill, but what we really need to be training is a state of mind.

Wicked problems are those without easy answers—where our rational, binary logic breaks down and our normal tools fail us. But the information richness of a nonordinary state affords us perspective and allows us to make connections where none may have existed before. And it doesn’t seem to matter which technique we deploy: mindfulness training, technological stimulation or pharmacological priming, the end results are substantial. Consider the gains: a 200 percent boost in creativity, a 490 percent boost in learning, a 500 percent boost in productivity.

The Pale of the Body is ascetic to its core: no pain, no gain. Altered states that arise within ourselves, via internal catalysts like prayer and meditation, are considered stable, reliable, and earned. If the goal is genuine transformation, then nothing as fleeting or pleasant as a flow state or psychedelic session can substitute for decades of prayer and meditation. “The ultimate wisdom of enlightenment,”11 author Sam Harris emphasized in his recent bestseller Waking Up, “whatever it is, cannot be a matter of having fleeting experiences… . Peak experiences are fine, but real freedom must be coincident with normal waking life.” In other words, insights gleaned from within the skin-bag are valid and true, while those glimpsed outside the skin-bag are not to be trusted. Experiences that require external catalysts, such as psychedelics and smart drugs, are volatile, unreliable, and, ultimately, too easy.

And that’s putting it mildly. Consider this Abbott and Costello–like “Who’s on first” exchange21 between Nutt and the home secretary: Home Secretary: You can’t compare harms from an illegal activity with a legal one. Nutt: Why not? Home Secretary: Because one’s illegal. Nutt: Why is it illegal? Home Secretary: Because it’s harmful. Nutt: Don’t we need to compare harms to determine if it should be illegal? Home Secretary: You can’t compare harms from an illegal activity with a legal one.

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.

Or consider three substances that sit squarely inside the state’s pale: caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. The coffee break, smoke break, and happy hour are the most culturally enshrined drug rituals of the modern era, even though two of the three are top-ten offenders in Nutt’s rankings. There’s hardly a single workplace in the Western world that doesn’t, at least informally, support this triad. And for good reason. An optimally tuned market economy needs alert employees who work as hard as possible for as long as possible. So dedicated time-outs for stimulant consumption (that is, the coffee break and, these days, the e-cigarette break) are institutionally sanctioned and socially reinforced. Which is where the cocktails come in. Without the soothing effects of alcohol, the cigarettes-and-coffee workforce would become jittery wrecks within a fortnight. Add in some booze from time to time and you’ve got a finely tuned cycle of stimulation-focus-decompression that dovetails with broader economic goals. “In the competitive environment of the firm,” explains Intel researcher and author Melissa Gregg in the Atlantic,25 “it is little wonder that workers resort to performance-enhancing drugs… . When so many jobs require social networking to maintain employability, these mood enhancers are a natural complement to the work day after 5 p.m. In an always-on world, professional credibility involves a judicious mix of just the right amount of uppers and downers to remain charming.” Because these substances drive us forward, they continue to sit inside society’s perimeter fence, and never mind the evidence.

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. These states can be destabilizing. It’s why psychologists use terms like “ego death” to describe the experiences. “[It’s] a sense of total annihilation,”29 writes psychiatrist Stanislav Grof in his book The Adventure of Self-Discovery. “This experience of ego-death seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of all previous reference points in the life of an individual.” In short, Alice didn’t wander into Wonderland—she fell down the rabbit hole.

And it’s not just the unscrupulousness of leaders; it’s the power of the tools they wield. During ecstasis, our sense of being an individual “I” gets replaced by the feeling of being a collective “we.” And this doesn’t just happen in small groups like the SEALs on night ops or Googlers at a desert festival. It’s also the feeling that arises at large political rallies, rock concerts, and sporting events. It’s one of the reasons people go on spiritual pilgrimages, and why evangelical megachurches are booming (with more than six million attendees every Sunday).30 Bring a large group of people together, deploy a suite of mind-melding technologies, and suddenly everyone’s consciousness is doing the wave.

But it’s a double-edged sword. When we lose ourselves and merge with the group, we are in danger of losing too much of ourselves. Our cherished rational individualism risks being overrun by the power of irrational collectivism.

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.

So why have we missed a revolution in human possibility? Because altered states have a distinctly checkered history of altering (nation) states. Because pipers, cults, and commies scare the pants off us. Because the drive to get out of our heads has ended in tragedy as often as ecstasy. Because the pale protects us as much as it confines us. Because no one wants to end up like the children of Hamelin, lured beyond the safety of the town walls, never to be heard from again.

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

Advances in psychology have given us a better sense of our own development and, with it, the space to move beyond socially defined identity. Stepping outside the monkey suits of our waking selves no longer means risking ridicule or madness. Higher stages of personal development have been demystified. We now have the data-driven models needed to navigate this formerly obscure terrain and clearer frameworks to make sense of the journey.

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.

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.’”

But many of the same interventions that can help us get our heads above water can just as effectively be devoted to raising our heads above the clouds. If we’re interested in untapped levels of performance improvement and lasting emotional change, peak states of consciousness may provide the quickest path between two points: a shortcut from A to E(cstasis).

Treatment is not just fixing what is broken, it is nurturing what is best within ourselves.”

Boston College’s Bill Torbert found that those at the top of the developmental pyramid36 not only were more ethical and empathetic; they performed better in the workplace as well. 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.” Consciousness, it turns out, goes straight to the bottom line.

In short, altered states can lead to altered traits.

And we now know why. Our facial expressions are hardwired5 into our emotions: we can’t have one without the other.

But the bigger point is that these studies reflect a sea change in how we think about thinking. They move us from “disembodied cognition,” the idea that our thinking happens only in the three pounds of gray matter tucked between our ears, to “embodied cognition,” where we see thinking for what it really is: an integrated, whole-system experience. “The body, the gut, the senses,6 the immune system, the lymphatic system,” explained embodied cognition expert and University of Winchester emeritus professor Guy Claxton to New York magazine, “are so instantaneously and complicatedly interacting that you can’t draw a line across the neck and say ‘above this line it’s smart and below the line it’s menial.’”

In fact, we’re not smart and we have bodies—we’re smart because we have bodies.7 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). This “second brain,” as scientists have dubbed it, lends some empirical support to the persistent notion of gut instinct.

And these whole-body perceptions can be easily influenced. If 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. The act of feeling physical warmth is enough to trigger a cognitive change: you literally warm up to people, no thinking required.

So what does any of this have to do with ecstasis? For those interested in shifting states, knowing that the body can drive the mind gives us a whole new set of knobs and levers with which to play. Einstein’s quote “you cannot solve a problem at the level at which it was created” is invariably used to encourage higher, more expansive solutions. But the opposite is equally true. Sometimes, lower, more basic solutions can have just as big an impact.

Transformational leaders not only regulated their own nervous systems better than most; they also regulated other people’s.

But most of us, when challenged, will do none of these things. We’ll think more, talk more, and stress more. We’ll wait until after we feel better to go for that walk in the sun, rather than going for that walk in order to feel better. We’ll wait until after we get that job offer to pump our fists and stand tall, instead of the other way around.

hammer, turning everything around us into a psychological problem to beat on. Instead, we can stay above our storytelling mind and simply monitor the knobs and levers of our neurobiology. And while this may seem far-fetched, top performers are already there. Tibetan monks can shut off their default mode network28 (or inner mind chatter) almost at will, SEAL snipers tune their brainwaves to the alpha frequency29 before locking on to targets, extreme athletes smooth out their heart rhythms30 right before dropping into a mountain or wave. They’re deliberately doing an end run around their conscious minds. They’re accessing more efficient and effective ways of being, and they’re doing this exactly backward from how most of us have been taught.

Which brings us back to ecstasis. When we step beyond our conventional egos and experience the richness of altered states, it’s essential to upgrade our software. Those monkey-suit personas we thought were us (until we suddenly realize they aren’t) don’t need to confine us or define us. “To diagnose … yourself while in the midst of action31 requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events,” Harvard Business School professor Ron Heifetz maintains. “‘Getting on the balcony’ … [provides] the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”

And this is what moving from OS to UI delivers: a better view from the balcony. When we consistently see more of “what is really happening,” we can liberate ourselves from the limitations of our psychology. We can put our egos to better use, using them to modulate our neurobiology and with it, our experience. We can train our brains to find our minds.

One of Grof’s main arguments was that during psychedelic states, our ego defenses are so diminished that we gain nearly direct access to the unconscious.

Today we’re following Fermi’s lead, applying the power of Big Data to approximate answers to the Big Questions. One or two data points like a Moses or a Joseph Smith can’t ever make a trend, but what about a thousand data points? A hundred thousand? A picture is starting to emerge of the worlds inside us. And while it’s no less strange, it is arguably a good deal more accurate than the singular epiphanies that have come before.

And, if Siegel’s predictions are correct, we’ve barely scratched the surface. “Consciousness-hacking technology is going to become as dynamic, available, and ubiquitous as cell phones. Imagine what happens if we can use personal technology to shift these experiences on demand, to support and catalyze the most important changes we can make at scale. More and more it’s looking like we can retune the nervous system of the entire planet.”

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” —William Blake

In his seminal book37 Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore outlined exactly how new ideas gain traction. At first, when breakthroughs happen, only those people willing to tolerate the risk and uncertainty of a novel technology get on board, a trade they’ll make for the benefits of being “early adopters.” Then there’s a gap, what Moore called “the chasm,” that any idea has to cross to attract a growing audience. It’s attracting that “early majority” on the far side of the chasm that he feels is the true mark of disruptive innovation.

“In [George Orwell’s] 1984 … people are controlled by inflicting pain,” wrote NYU professor Neil Postman. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting47 pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that our fears will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” And while the possibility of a nation deliberately invading our minds to shape and control behavior may feel like a relic of Cold War paranoia, the prospect of multinational corporations deliberately tweaking our subconscious desires to sell us more stuff is already here.

Open-sourcing ecstasis remains one of the best counterbalances to private and public coercion.

When the prefrontal cortex shuts down, impulse control,5 long-term planning, and critical reasoning faculties go offline, too. We lose our checks and balances. Combine that with excessive dopamine telling us that the connections we’re making are radically important and must be immediately acted upon—that we’re radically important and must be listened to—and it’s not hard to imagine how this goes wrong.

As Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield6 reminds us, “after the ecstasy, the laundry.”

A surfer who in a flow state drops into a wave and strings together a series of moves he’s never pulled off before may need months of hard training to be able to reproduce them in a contest. An entrepreneur who glimpses a brilliant business model while dancing at a festival may need years to build the company that actually delivers on it. A musician who hears a fully formed symphony in her head during a meditation retreat could take the rest of her life to become skilled enough to actually play

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,”11 Bill Gates once said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten.”

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.

For those exploring nonordinary states, there’s a similar danger. You can stay down too long, amazed at what you’re discovering. You also can become enraptured by the deep.

“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.”

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.

This leaves us with four rules of thumb to carry into our exploration of these states. It’s not about you and it’s not about now help us balance ego inflation and time distortion. While don’t become a bliss junky and don’t dive too deep ensure that we don’t get seduced by the sensations and information that arise in altered states.

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

“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.”

“Love tells me I am everything. Wisdom tells me I am nothing.28 And between these two banks, flows the river of my life.”

The love that “tells me I am everything” arises from the awe and connection that we often experience in these states. Endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin soothe our vigilance centers. We feel strong, safe, and secure. It’s a welcome relief, and healing for those who don’t often get to feel that way. The wisdom that “tells me I am nothing” springs from the information richness. Dopamine, anandamide, and norepinephrine turn the bitstream of consciousness into a flood. 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. 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 ecstasy will always come with the agony—that’s the human condition. Nothing we do absolves us from the broke-open beauty of that journey. So there will be cracks. Thankfully, there will be always be cracks. Because, as Cohen reminds us, that’s where the light gets in.

The same is true for ecstasis. Research shows that these experiences lift us above normal awareness, and propel us further faster. Much of our conventional schooling, personal development, and professional training still miscalculate this fact. It’s hard to fathom how much faster we can go, how much more ground we can cover, if we can only appreciate what high performance now looks like.

We no longer have to rely on someone stealing fire for us. Finally, we can kindle that flame ourselves.

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