Hitler wasn’t the only twentieth-century despot to rely on these techniques. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot sold the same thing: a Utopia of We, the experience of communitas at scale. They even sold it the same way. Nearly identical stump speeches: “Individualism is out. We are all one. No one is better than anyone else. Anyone who disagrees will either be shot, imprisoned or ‘rehabilitated.’” 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.
Part Two
The Four Forces of Ecstasis
“No one dances sober, unless he is insane.”
—Cicero
Chapter Four
Psychology
Translating Transformation
In the Middle Ages, priests routinely complained that their congregants nodded off in church. Still, despite the stuffy pews and unintelligible sermons, parishioners made sure they were awake for the most interesting part of the service: the miraculous transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. At that exact moment, the priest would utter a powerful incantation, what sounded like “hocus pocus,” and the magic would be done. Except, as Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson later noted,1 “in all probability . . . hocus pocus is nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus (“this is the body”), [a] ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church.”
Without the ability to understand Latin, the peasants had garbled the translation, providing would-be magicians with a catchphrase for centuries to come. But in 1439, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, giving the faithful the chance to read the Bible in their own language. Rather than deferring to the clergy, laypeople could suddenly debate and interpret scriptures and draw their own conclusions. This broke the church’s hold on Renaissance Europe and paved the way for reformations and revolutions.
Something similar is happening today. 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. These forces give us the chance to study, debate, reject, and revise long-standing beliefs of our own. We’re becoming more precise in our translations, learning to rely less on hocus-pocus and superstition, and more on science and experience.
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.
Advances in neurobiology, meanwhile, have clarified our understanding of what is happening in our brains and bodies when we experience a range of mental states. This sharpened perspective allows us to strip out the interpretations of past gatekeepers and understand, in simple and rational terms, the mechanics of transcendence. And unlike the take-it-on faith dictates of traditional mythologies, the discoveries of neurobiology are testable.
Pharmacology gives us another tool to explore this terrain. By treating the six powerful neurochemicals that underpin ecstasis as raw ingredients, we’ve begun to refine the recipes for peak experience. We’re translating the cookbook for kykeon, allowing us to tune these states with increasing precision, and giving us access to them on demand.
Our last force, technology, brings that access to scale. Whether we’re relying on flow-producing neurofeedback or awe-inducing virtual reality, these breakthroughs turn once-solitary epiphanies into experiences that can be shared by hundreds of thousands of people at once. More people having more experiences means more data and firmer conclusions.
Combined, these forces give us unprecedented insight into the upper range of human experience. In Part Two of this book, we’re going to examine them in detail, seeing where they come from and why they matter. We’ll meet the innovators and experts at the forefront of this movement, an unlikely collection of digital artists, consciousness hackers, sex therapists, and molecular chemists—to name a few—who are harnessing these four forces to drive change in the real world. By democratizing access to some of the more controversial and misunderstood territory in history, these modern-day Gutenbergs are taking experiences once reserved for mystics and making them available to the masses.
The Bell Tolles for Thee
In February 2009, Oprah Winfrey teamed up with2 Eckhart Tolle for Oprah and Eckhart: A New Earth, a ten-part online video series devoted to Tolle’s nontraditional ideas about spirituality. Eleven million people from 139 different countries tuned in to watch. Global brands—Chevy, Skype, and Post-it—sponsored the series. A New Earth attracted 10 million people3, or 800,000 more than turned up in New York City for the pope’s last visit and 9 million more than the largest haj (pilgrimage to Mecca) on record—making this webcast one of the ten largest spiritual “gatherings” in recorded history.
Yet Tolle remains an unusual candidate for guru of the century. He grew up in the rubble of postwar4 Germany, suffering acute anxiety and severe depression. By age ten, he was contemplating suicide. By age twenty-nine, while a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Cambridge, he snapped.
Tolle dropped out of graduate school and spent the next two years homeless, mostly sitting on a park bench in central London. He passed the time in a state of near-constant bliss—a state of oneness with the universe—that, he maintains, persists to this day.
In spiritual terms, Eckhart Tolle found sudden enlightenment. In the language of this book, he stabilized ecstasis, making the temporary selfless, timeless, and effortless experience of a non-ordinary state a part of his permanent reality. But go back a decade or two and traditional psychiatrists might have assessed his case very differently. Tolle would have been kept in a padded cell, sedated with Thorazine, and given a steady dose of electroshock therapy. Instead, he teamed up with Oprah to beam his unassuming talk of nondual consciousness out to millions of seekers around the world.
What Tolle is preaching is nothing less than the Gospel of STER. His core argument is that through the experience of selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness—his so-called “Power of Now”—we can dwell in a place of unlimited richness. And, if the popularity of his webcast is anything to go by, this idea is resonating with millions of people.
Which brings us to an important question: How did any of this happen? How did we get from a man who would have been institutionalized as clinically insane a few decades ago to where we are today, with that same man leading one of the largest spiritual gatherings in history?
To answer this question, we’ll need to understand how psychology became a force for ecstasis. We’ll start with origin stories, seeing how the human potential movement broadened the vocabulary of inner experience and then brought that vocabulary to the mainstream. A glimpse under the covers of a twenty-first-century sexual revolution will explore how an expanding menu of acceptable practices has given more people access to non-ordinary states than ever. We’ll then examine how researchers are using peak experiences to cure trauma in terminal patients and survivors of abuse and war. Finally, we’ll see how scientists have begun to integrate ideas about ecstasis into a rigorous model of human psychology that shows altered states don’t just make us feel better for a moment, they can actually further our development over a lifetim
e. But, before we can do any of that, we have to turn back the calendar some seventy years, and meet ourselves as we once were.
Mad Men
Coming out of World War II, our concept of self—of who we actually were—didn’t stretch very far. With the cardboard cutouts of Organization Man on one side and Betty Homemaker on the other, our sense of ourselves was constricted almost to the point of caricature. Hollywood stars like Gary Cooper and John Wayne epitomized a “strong and silent” masculine ideal, while soap operas and advertisements sold a flawless stay-at-home femininity. This was the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,5 when suburban conformity, consumerism, and corporate ladder-climbing had come to signify success.
But all this started to change in the late 1950s, as the Beats’ passionate rebellion found its voice. “The Beat Generation was a vision that we had,”6 explained Jack Kerouac in Aftermath, “of a generation of crazy illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America . . . characters of a special spirituality . . . staring out the dead wall window of our civilization.” 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.
Nowhere did this urge for raw self-expression show up more visibly than at Esalen, the Big Sur, California–based institute that the New York Times once called the “Harvard of the Human Potential movement.”8 So central was Esalen9 to the evolving identity of that generation that the popular TV show Mad Men ended with its main character Don Draper experiencing an epiphany on its oceanside front lawn (and as a harbinger of the spiritual marketplace that would soon emerge, he promptly turned that insight into the iconic “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” ad campaign).
While histories of Esalen tend to focus on founder Michael Murphy, whose family had owned that idyllic stretch of California coastline for generations, the path that led to Eckhart on Oprah was largely laid by Dick Price,10 Esalen’s cofounder and first director.
In 1952, Price came out of Stanford with a degree in psychology, and went to Harvard for graduate school, but, frustrated by the conservatism of the faculty, dropped out. He moved to San Francisco, bumped into the Beats, and, under their tutelage, began exploring Eastern mysticism and primal experience. Shaken loose from his moorings, Price suffered a manic episode at a North Beach, San Francisco bar in 1956 and was hauled off for a three-month stint on an Army psych ward.
While the state labeled him “psychotic,” Price didn’t accept that he had gone crazy. He labeled his unhinging a “transitional psychosis” and argued that his time on the ward served a useful purpose: unlocking a door within himself. “[My] so-called ‘psychosis,’” Price later said, “was an attempt toward spontaneous healing, and it was a movement toward health, not a movement toward disease.”
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.
Over the next two decades, Price and Murphy evolved this insight into a pragmatic philosophy. They took the best that organized religion had to offer, stripped out anything that was doctrinal or impractical, and placed a heavy emphasis on ecstatic experimentation. It was a “pragmatic culture of sensation and know-how,” notes author and modern religious historian Erik Davis11 in AfterBurn, “an essentially empirical approach to matters of the spirit that made tools more important than beliefs. Consciousness-altering techniques like meditation, biofeedback, yoga, ritual, isolation tanks, tantric sex, breathwork, martial arts, group dynamics and drugs were privileged over the claustrophobic structures of authority and belief that were seen to define conventional religion.”
It was a uniquely American approach that resonated deeply with the country’s anti-authoritarian ideals. Rice University religious scholar Jeff Kripal called it the “Religion of No Religion,” writing in his book Esalen, “It has no official alliance with any religious system. It can provide, like a kind of American Mystical Constitution, a spiritual space where almost any religious form can flourish, provided . . . that it does not . . . claim to speak for everyone. As an early Esalen motto put it,12 ‘No one captures the flag.’”
Despite its inclusive charter, the institute’s impact was limited to a thin slice of the population. With its deep roots in Ivy League intellectualism and ascetic Eastern mysticism, this new philosophy mainly attracted well-educated freethinkers from New England and California. That is, until Werner Erhard came along and transplanted Esalen’s esoteric ideas out of bohemia and into the belly of the mainstream.
Erhard, a self-educated car salesman from St. Louis, was drawn to personal development through his study of motivation. He quickly realized that many of the ideas of the human potential movement had applications beyond spiritual seeking. So Erhard repackaged an assortment of Esalen-inspired13 practices into a business-friendly format, creating EST, short for the Erhard Seminars Training. The seminar deliberately reproduced Price’s accidental transformation, engineering a “breakdown-to-breakthrough” experience via a series of marathon, fourteen-hour days, without food or breaks, and with lots of yelling and profanity—the fabled “EST encounter.”
Prior to Erhard, most spiritual seekers skewed anti-establishment and antimaterialist—which is fine if you’re living in a monastery or off a trust fund, but problematic if you need to make a living. And even more problematic if you’re trying to sell seminars. 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. And the American spiritual marketplace has never been the same.
If you’ve ever hired a personal or executive coach (professions that didn’t exist before the late 1970’s), heard someone say they “just needed space,” been encouraged to “take a stand” or “make a difference,” or engaged in a journey of “transformation” around your “personal story”—you’ve come across terms coined or popularized by Erhard and his trainings. And with this expansion of vocabulary and emphasis on material success, what had been formerly “other,” that is, couched in the esoteric language of Asian religions and incompatible with the American dream, became us—part of our everyday vernacular, and accessible to all.
While EST itself made an impact, with almost one million people going through those original seminars, Landmark, the latest incarnation of Erhard’s teachings, boasts corporate clients including Microsoft,14 NASA, Reebok, and Lululemon. Personal development, which only a few decades ago had been mocked and marginalized, has become a credible way to “optimize human capital” at some of the country’s most successful organizations.
We hear echoes of these ideas everywhere, from Tony Robbins’s empowerment seminars to the prosperity theology preached every Sunday by megachurch ministers like Joel Osteen. And even though Tolle’s teachings stay remarkably grounded in his own realization, the larger notion that spiritual awareness can bring material fulfillment—that, perhaps, you can have nirvana, a happy marriage, and the shiny new car—helps explain how 11 million fans of Oprah even heard of him in the first place.
Taking the Kink Out of Kinky
The lineage that goes from Esalen to EST to Eckhart is one of increasing self-exploration, of pushing beyond the limits of what was considered safe or acceptable. Price and the Beats gave us a way to get past the taboos of primal expression and mental illness. Erhard broke down the taboo segregating spiritual merit from material success. The human potential movement normalized the use of ecstatic practices for psychological growth. Along the way, we came up with broader versions of ourselves, and new ways
to interact with each other. But nowhere were taboos more visibly challenged than in the realm of sexuality.
And while the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and ‘70’s increased the amount of sex people were having, we want to focus here on a more recent development—what kind of sex people are having today. Specifically, how a growing subset of experiences formerly defined as “kinky”—meaning taboo and outside the norm—are giving more people access to ecstasis than ever.
In 2014, we were invited to San Francisco to speak about the overlap between the neuroscience of flow, meditation, and sexuality, and see the cutting edge of this latter domain up close. Justine Dawson, the CEO of OneTaste and our host for the weekend, escorted us to our chairs in the front row of a packed auditorium, ascended the stage, dropped her pants, and lay back on a massage table.
OneTaste’s founder, Nicole Daedone, entered stage right. Wearing a gray wool dress and a large black apron, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves, dipped her forefinger and thumb into a jar of artisanal lube, and went to work. The reclined Dawson began mewling. With an entertainer’s’ flair for the theatrical, Nicole paused, swiveled on a stilettoed black boot, and punched her hand in the air like a rock guitarist. The audience began calling out words to describe their own experience. “Tingling in my groin,” one woman announced. “Heat,” said another. “Tumescence,” blurted a software engineer.
On the OneTaste website, they describe their central practice as OMing,15 short for “orgasmic meditation,” and we’d just witnessed a mainstage demonstration by the masters. A tightly circumscribed, almost ritualized practice, OMing involves stroking the upper left quadrant of a woman’s clitoris for exactly fifteen minutes without attachment to outcome or expectation of reciprocity. Their goal is to create a “turned on” woman—one who is neurochemically saturated, physically open, and emotionally empowered.
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