Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  And they’re not the first, by any means, to use sex as a trigger for nonordinary states of awareness. From the ancient “wine, women, and song” to the boomers’ “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” erotic techniques have always featured heavily on Promethean playlists.

  “The search for personal transformation,16 including through sex, led to the oceanside hot tubs at . . . Esalen,” explains Patricia Brown in her New York Times article on orgasmic meditation. “One Taste is but the latest stop on this sexual underground, weaving together strands of radical individual freedom, Eastern spirituality, and feminism.”

  Their message appears to be getting traction: OneTaste has centers in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, London, and Sydney, along with a dozen other cities. They’ve received largely favorable coverage in the Atlantic, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, and dozens of other publications (the clincher is always a female journalist who tries it out herself). To put this in perspective, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger17 had to flee the United States in 1914 to avoid prosecution for sharing basic information about contraception. Yet, in 2015, OneTaste notched a placement on the Inc. 5000—an annual ranking of high-growth companies.

  The popularity of orgasmic meditation makes sense once you understand what it can do. “In French literature,” University of Pennsylvania neurologist18 Anjan Chatterjee explains in his book The Aesthetic Brain, “the release from orgasm is famously referred to as la petite mort, the little death . . . the person is in a state without fear and without thought of themselves or their future plans. . . . This pattern of deactivation could be the brain state of a purely transcendent experience enveloping a core experience of pleasure.”

  Social scientist Jenny Wade19 has spent her career studying these same phenomena. “The fact is, sex—all by itself,” she writes in her book Transcendent Sex, “can trigger states identical to those attained by spiritual adepts of all traditions.” By Wade’s estimate, nearly 20 million Americans have had at least one encounter with boundary-dissolving, self-obliterating sex. “[It’s] happened to countless thousands of people regardless of their background,” she notes, “ to hairdressers, investment managers, nurses, lawyers, retailers and executives.”

  But if 20 million of us have experienced transcendent sex, why aren’t we talking about it more often? “Most volunteers said they had never confided their experiences to their lovers,” Wade reports, “for fear their partners would make fun of, not be interested in, or not be receptive to ‘spiritual stuff.’” Yet it’s not only the “spiritual stuff” that gives people pause. Sometimes it’s merely who’s doing what with whom, and what would the neighbors think.

  For most of the twentieth century, we had no idea what people were up to in their bedrooms or what normal actually looked like. Long after Masters and Johnson and Kinsey and company did their best to extract honest answers from modest people about their sex lives (and were consistently lied to—men overestimated the length of appendages, women sandbagged on their number of partners, and everyone fudged when reporting edgier behavior), we still tend to keep our most intimate thoughts and experiences under wraps. But technology is helping to lift that veil, creating a “digital commons” where we can discreetly bypass nosy neighbors to explore our actual desires.

  For the past five years, the French research group Sexualitics20 has been building the “Porngram,” an analytic tool to track online sexual behaviors across the world. “Traces left by billions of users give us cultural snapshots of tastes,” they wrote in their 2014 paper “Deep Tags: Toward a Quantitative Analysis of Online Pornography.” “[M]ore importantly, they enable researchers to look for structures and patterns in the evolutionary dynamics of practices adopted by a significant and growing proportion of the human population.”

  And the biggest pattern revealed by this data is that we’re more curious about the outer edges of human sexuality than at any other time in history (and this includes women, who now make up a third of all online porn viewers). Simply judging by today’s top search terms—an assortment that would make a sailor blush—we find a greater interest in activities that, until recently, were considered deviant by psychiatric professionals or prosecuted outright by law.

  Take, for example, BDSM, short for bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism, a category that includes a range of intense pleasure/pain stimulation and role-play. Until recently, BDSM was mostly practiced by a fringe subculture, and at some risk. In America, evidence of these behaviors was admissible in court as grounds for divorce or denial of child custody.

  But, in 2010, the American Psychiatric Association agreed to redefine21 “aberrant sexual behavior” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the bible for mental illness classification), making a clear distinction between elective play and actual pathology. For the first time, consenting adults weren’t considered morally deviant or mentally ill for choosing sexual behavior that was beyond the pale.

  Which was just in time, considering the following year E. L. James published Fifty Shades of Grey. A critically panned but wildly popular novel, Fifty Shades cataloged the BDSM-driven sexual awakening of a college student at the hands of a handsome young billionaire. It became one of the fastest-selling books in history22 and sold more copies on Amazon than all of J. K. Rowling’s seven-volume Harry Potter series combined. But, if it wasn’t literary merit that vaulted this book into a global phenomenon, what was it?

  You could make a case that, in the same way that electronic dance music thrives largely because of its ability to generate a shift in state, Fifty Shades represents a sexual equivalent. It’s a de facto user manual for erotic ecstasis that many of its readers never dared imagine. With this one book, Kindles and minivans replaced brown-paper-wrapped smut and trench coats. Edgy sex went suburban.

  If you get past the snickering, the exceptional popularity of the book is understandable. Beyond simple novelty or variety, this broader range of sexual experiences is giving people access to altered states that “vanilla” sexuality rarely does. To return to the “knobs and levers” of ecstasis, we know full-spectrum sexuality contains many of the same triggers that produce STER through meditation, flow states, and psychedelic experiences. Pleasure produces endorphins, but pain can prompt even more. The uncertainty of teasing, as Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky established, spikes dopamine 400 percent. Nipple stimulation boosts oxytocin. Pressure in the throat or colon regulates the vagus nerve,23 creating exhilaration, intense relaxation, and goose bumps, what Princeton gastroenterologist Anish Sheth memorably terms poo-phoria. “To some it may feel like a religious experience,” Sheth writes, “to others like an orgasm, and to a lucky few like both.”

  And momentary erotic transcendence can bring lasting change. A 2013 Dutch study found that kinky sex24 practitioners “were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, and had higher subjective well-being.” Nor are these benefits reserved just for the socially progressive. Minister Ed Young25 of the mega–Fellowship Church in Dallas, Texas, exhorts his congregation of thousands to the “Seven Days of Sex” challenge, where they commit to sex every day for a week to deepen their spiritual union. “And when I say intimacy, I don’t mean holding hands in the park or a back rub,” Young clarified. “If you make the time to have sex, it will bring you closer to your spouse and to God.”

  This grassroots movement, combined with growing research, make it clear that sexuality is becoming one of the more popular techniques of ecstasy available today. Once we step beyond taboos and social conditioning, it’s easier to see that access to ecstasis has been hardwired into us all along. In the past, you had to risk social or legal censure if you tried to figure it for yourself. Now there’s a broad movement to explore full-spectrum sexuality and elevate it from compulsion or perversion, into something more deliberate, playful, and potent.

  The arc of the moral universe may be long, but it’s bending toward the kinky.

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nbsp; Good for What Ails You

  Even with all these new approaches to ecstasis at our disposal—from the EST encounter to more adventuresome sexuality—a critical question remains: can these fleeting moments produce meaningful psychological change? If not, it would be hard to justify their additional risks and complications. If so, they might earn a legitimate spot in the tool kit of personal development. And one of the starkest tests for ecstasis is, can it help survivors of serious trauma? If you can heal them, presumably, you can heal just about anyone.

  One of the first people to try to address this question was Brown University neuroscientist Willoughby Britton. In the 1990s, Britton became interested in near-death experiences (NDEs),26 where subjects had transcendental encounters during life-threatening events (including the widely reported tunnel-of-light journey). Thirty years of research showed that people who had an NDE scored exceptionally high on tests of overall life satisfaction. As a trauma expert, Britton found this unusual.

  In her experience, most people who came close to dying were scarred by the event, developing post-traumatic stress and other mental health conditions. But if those studies were right, then people who had a transcendent near-death experience were having a decidedly atypical response to trauma.

  Britton decided to find out how atypical. After recruiting twenty-three NDE’ers and twenty-three control subjects, she hooked them all up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines and ran a sleep study. Her goal was both to get a clear picture of brainwave activity and record how long it took her subjects to enter REM sleep—an excellent way to measure happiness and well-being.

  Normal people go into REM at about 90 minutes; depressed people enter sooner, usually at 60 minutes. Generally happy people head in the opposite direction, dropping into REM at around 100 minutes. Britton discovered that NDEers delayed entry until 110 minutes—which meant that they were off the charts for happiness and life satisfaction.

  And when Britton examined the EEG data, she discovered why: the brain-firing patterns of her subjects were completely altered. It was as if the NDE had instantly rewired their gray matter. Sure, it was only a single experiment, but it did suggest that even a one-time encounter with a powerful altered state could impart lasting change.

  Despite this intriguing result, few studies followed. NDE’s posed a serious research challenge: they are, ipso facto, accidental, and not easily repeatable in the lab.

  Then Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Roland Griffiths27 came up with an elegant solution. Rather than scouring the country for small groups of NDE survivors, Griffiths tapped a much larger population facing death: terminal cancer patients. And instead of waiting for a fleeting and hard to replicate tunnel-of-light journey, he relied on chemistry to produce a similar impact on-demand.

  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.

  More recently, researchers have learned that you don’t have to be on the verge of dying to experience relief—that an encounter with ecstasis can help the “walking wounded” as well. In 2012, psychologist Michael Mithoefer discovered that even a single dose28 of MDMA can reduce or cure post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in survivors of child abuse, sexual abuse, and combat. “It was completely cathartic,” reported an Army ranger who suffered a broken back and severe head trauma in Iraq. “The next day [after just one session] the nightmares were gone. I was glowing and extroverted for the first time since getting blown up. MDMA gave me my life back.”

  To put the options trauma survivors have into perspective, nearly 25 million Americans suffer from PTSD, yet the only two drugs approved for treatment are Prozac and Zoloft. Both require weeks or even months to get into our system, while their effects last only as long as we continue taking them. Stop the pills and you return, more or less, to where you started.

  In contrast, Mithoefer found that the benefits provided by one to three rounds of MDMA therapy lasts for years. These results outstrip conventional treatments so convincingly that, in May 2015, the federal government approved studies of MDMA as a treatment for depression and anxiety.

  Flow researchers have achieved comparable results without drugs, simply by altering neurobiological function. In 2007, working with Iraq War veterans at Camp Pendleton, occupational therapist Carly Rogers of the University of California, Los Angeles blended surfing (a reliable flow trigger) and talk therapy into a treatment for PTSD. It was essentially the same protocol Mithoefer used, only with the flow generated by action sports substituting for MDMA.

  Much like in Mithoefer’s study, sufferers experienced nearly immediate relief. “After just a few waves, they [the soldiers with PTSD] were laughing in the surf lineup,” reported Outside magazine. “‘Oh my God, our Marines are talking,’ said the lieutenant who approved the experiment. ‘They don’t talk. Ever.’”

  Since then, the program has been formalized, and more than a thousand soldiers have taken part. Hundreds of veterans and surfers have volunteered their time, including eleven-time world champion Kelly Slater. 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.”

  And surfing isn’t the only non-pharmacological intervention to show promise. 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.

  Taken together, all this work—from the NDE studies to the cancer and trauma research to the flow and meditation programs—demonstrates that even brief moments spent outside ourselves produce positive impact, regardless of the mechanisms used to get there. And they can provide these benefits in the face of the deepest challenges imaginable.

  Yet, in each of these instances, the only people given permission to explore altered states were those, quite literally in some cases, left for dead. It’s almost as if dispensing these techniques to normal people would be unseemly or, at the very least, unscientific.

  In her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain,29 science writer Sharon Begley highlights this problem, describing the history of psychology as one favoring remediation over transformation: “Science has always focused . . . on people and conditions that are pathological, disturbed, or at best normal. . . . In the past thirty years, there have been about forty-six thousand scientific studies on depression and an underwhelming four hundred on joy. . . . As long as someone can obtain nonsickness that is deemed sufficient. 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).

  Altered States to Altered Traits

  One summer day, while working in the garden with his young daughter, Nicki, University
of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman30 had, in his own words, “an epiphany.” Seligman was meticulously freeing weeds with a trowel, and neatly setting them aside in a discard pile. Nicki, being five, was just having fun. “Weeds were flying up in the air,” Seligman later said, “dirt was spraying everywhere.”

  Seligman, who describes himself as both a “serious gardener” and a “serious grouch,” couldn’t take it. He started yelling. But Nicki wasn’t having any of it. She stomped over with a stern look on her face.

  “Daddy,” she said, “I want to talk with you. From the time I was three until I was five, I whined a lot. But I decided the day I turned five to stop whining. And I haven’t whined once since. . . . If I could stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.” Seligman decided to take her up on the challenge, and bring the field of psychology along for the ride.

  In 1998, after being elected president of the American Psychological Association,31 Seligman made positive psychology the central focus of his tenure. “I want to remind our field that it has been side-tracked,” he wrote in his first Presidential Column for the APA’s newsletter. “Psychology is not just the study of weakness and damage, it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken, it is nurturing what is best within ourselves.”

  If those trauma studies demonstrated that a few instances of ecstasis can help mend what’s broken, then what happens if we deploy these techniques repeatedly, over the course of a lifetime? Can recurring access to these states really “nurture what is best within ourselves?” Can they, as Alan Watts suggested, be used to “cultivate the exceptional”?

  Oddly, in the history of adult psychology, the idea that we could cultivate anything over time was considered suspect. After adolescence, the thinking went, adults were pretty much fully baked. Sure, we could learn technical skills, like going to business school or picking up a musical instrument, but our ability to add psychological capacities—like the gratitude and empathy that Nicki asked her father to embrace—was believed to be pretty much over and done with by the time we’d graduated from college.