Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  With these developments, psychedelics have begun moving from recreational diversion to performance-enhancing supplement. “A shift began about four or five years ago,” author and venture capitalist Tim Ferriss45 told us. “Once Steve Jobs and other successful people began recommending the use of psychedelics for enhancing creativity and problem solving, the public became a little more open to the possibility.”

  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.”

  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.47

  Creativity, learning, and productivity are essential skills and those percentage gains are big numbers. If they were merely the result of a few studies done by a couple of labs, they would be easier to dismiss. But there is now seven decades of research, conducted by hundreds of scientists on thousands of participants, showing that when it comes to complex problem solving, ecstasis could be the “wicked solution” we’ve been looking for.

  Chapter Three

  Why We Missed It

  Beyond the Pale

  In 1172, the English invaded Ireland, planted their flag, and built a great big fence. That barrier, known as the English Pale1—from pale, meaning a stake or picket—defined the world for those invaders. Within their pale, all was safe, true and good, a civilized land ruled by English law and institutions.

  Beyond the pale, on the other hand, lay bad news. That’s where mayhem, murder, and madness resided. Most who ventured beyond it were never heard from again. And the few who did manage to return weren’t always welcomed with open arms. They were no longer trustworthy; they might have seen too much.

  So, if you ask the question—where has this Promethean revolution been hiding— beyond the pale is a big part of the answer. That’s because the experiences at the center of this book stand outside the perimeter fence of polite society. Instead of hearing stories about the possibilities of altered states, we’re treated to cautionary tales. Stories of hubris and excess. Icarus redux.

  This bias has obscured our view. It’s clouded our judgment and cut us off from vital parts of ourselves and our potential. To get a better understanding of precisely how this has happened, we’ll meet a jack Mormon rock star, a cyborg philosopher, and a disgraced scientist. Through their stories, we’ll examine three instances of our current Pale—the Pale of the Church, the Pale of the Body, and the Pale of the State. We’ll detail the historical reasons for each, and explore why understanding the role of the Pale is essential for anyone exploring ecstasis.

  Let’s start with the rock star.

  The Pale of the Church

  James Valentine is a tall, thin man2 in his late thirties, with shoulder-length straight brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a scraggly beard. In person, he’s thoughtful and soft-spoken. Onstage, as lead guitarist for Maroon 5, he’s one of the more successful musicians in the world. Over the past fifteen years, there’s rarely been a time when the band didn’t have a song on the Billboard charts. They’ve won just about every music award, including three Grammys, three People’s Choice Awards, and three MTV Music Awards. Yet, had a thirteen-year-old Valentine not bumped into the Holy Ghost while rounding first base, none of this would have happened.

  That encounter took place in 1991, at a baseball field in Lincoln, Nebraska. Valentine, a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, came from a religious family. His ancestors were Mormon pioneers, among those early faithful who fled religious persecution in Illinois and eventually settled their wagon trains in Salt Lake City, Utah. His grandfather was the mission president for South America; his aunt was secretary to the church’s top leader, Prophet Thomas Monson. His father taught literature at Brigham Young University, while his brother and three sisters all graduated from the school.

  This was supposed to be Valentine’s path, too. He would finish high school, go on a mission—a two-year voluntary stint devoted to proselytizing and humanitarian aid work—and then return home to attend BYU and a life spent serving his church. Until that baseball game got in the way.

  To understand what happened to Valentine during that game, we need to understand that Mormons believe the Holy Ghost can enter a person during prayer. “The feeling of spirit entering you,” explains Valentine, “what Mormons call ‘the feeling of the Holy Ghost,’ is the very center of the religion. And it’s a real sensation, a burning in the bosom that becomes a deeply joyful sense of peace and connection to something much greater than yourself.”

  Yet, there was absolutely no reason that Valentine should have rounded first base and bumped into the Holy Ghost. There is nothing particularly sacred about baseball. “It didn’t make any sense,” he explains. “I was a spiritual kid. I’d had plenty of experiences when the spirit entered me. But all of them took place in church, while praying. Not on a baseball field. It was incredibly confusing. I mean, as far as I knew, the Holy Ghost didn’t really play baseball.”

  His confusion triggered a brief crisis of faith. But the real trouble showed up later that same year, when Valentine picked up a guitar. “When I started playing I also started having these crazy peak experiences,” he explains. “Music was a direct pipeline into another world. And the feeling I got was exactly like the feeling of the Holy Ghost—the same feeling I bumped into rounding first base—only much more powerful. I would get sucked into these intense trances that would last for hours. I’d get so lost that drool would pour out of my mouth. I wouldn’t even notice. And maybe the Holy Spirit was okay with baseball, but rock-’n’-roll? That was just totally out of bounds. But everything that’s happened since, my whole career, has been an attempt to chase this feeling.”

  The pale that Valentine ventured beyond, call it the Pale of the Church, is an age-old barrier for the spiritually curious. It’s a divide between those who believe that direct access to God should be moderated by a learned elite and those who believe direct access should be available to anyone at any time. Top-down versus bottom-up.

  Ecstasy in small doses, metered out by those in charge, is a time-honored technique for social bonding and bureaucratic control. But ecstasy from a fire hose, filling anyone who asks with vibrant certainty, never mind the doctrine? That’s downright dangerous.

  In Christianity, it shows up as the tension between chapter-and-verse Roman Catholics and holy-rolling Pentecostals; in Islam, it’s solemn imams versus twirling Sufis; in China, it’s by-the-book Confucians against go-with-the-flow Taoists. In each case, a small community figures out a more direct path to knowledge and, because they blossom without the sanction of the orthodoxy, they are persecuted for it.

  Spiritual subcultures that slip through heaven’s gate tend to piss off the gatekeepers. In Valentine’s case, once he realized the church wasn’t his only access to the Holy Ghost, his dependence on organized religion dwindled. By the time he was sixteen, he told his father he wasn’t going on a mission; by the time he was eighteen, he had left home for a life in rock and roll. But none of this was easy. “The Pale of the Church had a real hold on me,” admits Valentine. “I was terrified to venture beyond it. I had no real idea what was going to happen.”

  Compared to many who came before him, Valentine got off lightly. Historically, we denounce these seekers in the strongest terms available. Consider Joan of Arc,3 the medieval French peasant girl who heard angel
s and led her nation to victory in the Hundred Years’ War. She won battles, restored a king, and shook Europe’s political, military, and religious structures to their core. But because she was an unordained woman claiming to know God’s will, she found herself on the wrong side of the Pale of the Church, with tragic consequences.

  At her trial for heresy,4 church officials denied her a lawyer, stacked the jury against her, and sent death threats to the judge. Then they tried to trap her with an impossible question: “Do you believe you experience the grace of God?”

  If she answered “no,” then she’d be admitting that the voices she heard were diabolical, not divine—and she would have to die for it. If she answered “yes,” that she definitely knew she was in God’s grace, then she’d have violated one of the core tenets of their doctrine—and she would have to die for it. Joan dodged both responses elegantly: “If I am not [in a state of grace], may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.”

  She evaded the legalistic trap set for her, and at the same time affirmed her blameless faith. “Those who were interrogating her,” the court notary remarked, “were stupefied.”

  But even that inspired testimony was not enough to save her young life. The presiding bishop replaced the nuns who should have been guarding her with soldiers who tried to rape her instead. Joan put men’s breeches on to protect her honor, and then tied all of her leggings, hose, and tunic together in a kind of jury-rigged chastity belt.

  The bishop seized the moment, condemning her for the lesser charge of cross-dressing-as-heresy. She had stolen fire and, the Church insisted, she’d die by it. They had her burned at the stake three times over, and so no one could gather a relic, dumped her ashes into the Seine.

  The Pale of the Church is why, despite millennia of bold experimentation, the insights of mystics rarely survive. Their beliefs are ridiculed and their motives maligned. Lest anyone try to follow in their footsteps, their recipes for ecstasy are torn to pieces and scattered to the wind. Even when religions are built on the epiphanies of their founders, attempts to repeat those original experiments are strongly discouraged. It’s one of the main reasons we’ve failed to notice the possibilities of non-ordinary states.

  The Pale of the Church has been blocking our view.

  The Pale of the Body

  In the late 1990s, University of Edinburgh philosopher Andy Clark was researching cyborgs when he realized we were closer to that man-machine merger than anyone wanted to admit. If you have a pacemaker, cochlear implant or even a pair of eyeglasses, you’re using technology to upgrade biology. What Clark found strange was that no one seemed to notice these developments. Type “cyborg” into a search bar and the first thing that pops up is “a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements.” But there’s nothing fictional about eyeglasses or smartphones (or, for that matter, artificial hearts and bionic limbs). So why, Clark wanted to know, haven’t we acknowledged that we’re already becoming cyborgs?

  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). “[It is] the prejudice that whatever matters5 about my mind,” Clark explains in his book Natural-Born Cyborgs, “depends solely on what goes on inside my biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin and skull.” We have trouble admitting we’re cyborgs then, because the very prospect of augmenting ourselves with technology seems suspect.

  And the skin-bag bias extends beyond tools that augment our bodies, to techniques that enhance our minds. In 2012, a study conducted by the American Pediatric Association found that one out of five Ivy League college students was taking “smart drugs” to help improve academic performance6. By 2015, that number had jumped to one in three7 (in all college students). Almost immediately, there was a backlash. You might think the backlash was about safety. After all, the term “smart drug” applies to the unsupervised and often dangerous off-label use of ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall. But public health wasn’t the issue.

  Instead, in November 2015, USA Today, Washington Post, and a half-dozen other major news outlets all asked the same question: “Are Smart Drugs Cheating?”8 It’s a peculiar question. Students use these drugs because they improve focus and help them work longer and harder. It’s the same thing a cup of coffee and a study group provides. But gatherings of caffeinated coeds aren’t considered cheating, so what makes smart drugs any different?

  Or consider our distrust of a more controversial class of “smart” drugs: psychedelics. Seventy years ago, the influential University of Chicago historian Mircea Eliade coined the phrase “archaic techniques of ecstasy”9 to describe singing, dancing, chanting, and meditation, or all the “original and pure” techniques that shamans used to alter consciousness. But he left out an important category. While shamans on nearly every continent have long utilized psychotropic plants like mushrooms and cacti to shift states and access insight, Eliade omitted this fact, editing history to come down on the side of the skin-bag. “Narcotics,” he argued10 in his classic book Shamanism, “are only a vulgar substitute for ‘pure’ trances . . . an imitation of a state that the shaman is no longer capable of attaining otherwise.”

  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.

  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.

  In 1962, attempting to settle this skin-bag debate, Walter Pahnke conducted one of the more famous psychedelic experiments12 in history. A graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, Pahnke gathered a group of twenty seminary students at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel on Good Friday. To see if mind-altering drugs could produce “authentic” mystical experiences, he gave half the group psilocybin, the other half the active placebo niacin (which produces similar physiological changes without the cognitive effects), then everyone went into chapel to attend the Good Friday service.

  Afterward, subjects rated the service for a variety of mystical qualities: sacredness, ineffability, distortion of time and space, and a sense of oneness with the divine. “[Psilocybin] subjects ranked their experiences13 much higher in mystical qualities than members of the control group did,” explains John Horgan in his book Rational Mysticism. “Six months later, the psilocybin group reported persistent beneficial effects on their attitude and behavior; the experience had deepened their religious faith. . . . The experiment was widely hailed as proof that psychedelic drugs can generate life-enhancing mystical experiences.” So life-enhancing, in fact, that nine out of the ten seminary students who received psilocybin ended up becoming ministers, while none of the placebo group stayed on the path to ordination.

  Yet the skin-bag bias has been hard to shake. Despite coming from a tightly controlled study at one of the nation’s top institutions, these findings didn’t do much to alter popular opinion or academic consensus. Re
searchers have twice gone back to validate Pahnke’s14 work. In 2002, Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths got the same results when he reran the experiment with full double-blind modern standards. When author Michael Pollan asked him15 about this unusual need for redundancy, in a 2015 New Yorker article, Griffiths’s answer said it all: “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.”

  Yet it’s important to remember that the skin-bag bias isn’t simply about our distrust of pharmacology—whether study drugs or psychedelics. It’s really about our distrust of technology in general. That was cyborg philosopher Andy Clark’s point. And, since consciousness-altering technology is changing fast, these developments are bringing up new test cases for what we consider “legitimately earned” ecstasis.

  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, sensed presences, and other notable altered states. Persinger built a helmet that directs electromagnetic pulses toward this brain region. More than two thousand people have tried out the device, and the majority have had some form of nonordinary experience.