Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  The Bliss Point, as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Michael Moss describes in his book Salt, Sugar, Fat, is “the precise amount of sweetness [or saltiness or fattiness]—no more, no less—that makes food and drink most enjoyable.” And not surprisingly, ARISE was deeply interested in hacking the Bliss Point.

  “[Salt, sugar, and fat] were the three pillars of processed food, the creators of crave,” Moss explains. “They were also the ingredients that more than any other were directly responsible for the obesity epidemic. . . . [T]he salt, which was processed in dozens of ways to maximize the jolt that tastebuds would feel with the very first bite . . . the fats, which delivered the biggest load of calories and worked more subtly in inducing people to overeat, and . . . the sugar, whose raw power in exciting the brain made it perhaps the most formidable ingredient of all.”

  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.

  In the quarter century since that Venice meeting, the food industry has become so good at manipulating these evolutionary impulses that we’ve eaten ourselves into a coma. According to the National Institutes of Health, 74 percent of American men and 33 percent of children are now overweight or obese. Our Bliss Point got hacked, and it’s killing us.

  Yet salt, sugar, fat provide a fraction of the payoff of ecstasis. In that state, we get access to all the brain’s feel-good neurochemistry at once. For most of evolutionary history, nonordinary states were rare and precious experiences. So when we consider how readily accessible the four forces are making them today, it’s important to remember that we’re tinkering with impulses that are millions of years old. If the desire to get out of our heads is, as UCLA’s Ron Siegel suggests,22 a “fourth evolutionary drive,” right after food, water, and sex, then nearly unlimited access to ecstasis needs some checks and balances of its own. Otherwise our Bliss Point can become the flashpoint for a meltdown.

  So how to pursue this path without getting “hooked on the high”? If we use the ecstasis equation to help us answer the question, “What is the best way to get into the zone?” then we need to add an additional concept here—hedonic calendaring—which helps us figure out how often we should get into the zone.

  Hedonic calendaring provides a way to hack the ecstatic path without coming undone. It gives us a method to integrate hard-and-fast approaches like extreme skiing and psychedelics with slow and steady paths like meditation and yoga. It’s one way to turn ecstasis into a sustainable long-term practice. And for anyone interested, there’s a free downloadable Hedonic Calendaring PDF at www.stealingfirebook.com/downloads/

  Step One: List everything you love to do (or that you’d like to do) that gets you out of your head. Action sports, yoga, live music, sex, brain stimulation, meditation, personal growth workshops, adventure travel, etc. This may seem simple, but if you consider the breadth of the Altered States Economy and the fact that we tend to compartmentalize the many different ways we modulate consciousness, putting it all down in one place can lend some fresh perspective.

  Step Two: Use the Ecstasis Equation (Time X Reward/Risk) to rank this list for value. Think daily sun salutations versus an annual ultramarathon, or a ten-minute meditation versus a trip to see a Peruvian shaman.

  Step Three: Sort your activities into one of five buckets: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Seasonally, and Annually. More intense experiences typically provide more information but they do so at a higher level of risk. So it makes sense to allow plenty of time for recovery and integration between those sessions while committing to more frequent supportive practices.

  How will you know if you’ve put the right activities in the right place? You’ll feel mildly disappointed by how often you get to deploy a particular technique. When you deliberately combine ecstatic practices, you generate momentum surprisingly quickly and it’s easy to feel like you’re getting out of control. It’s far better to start a little slowly, than skid off the track in turn one.

  Step Four: Research shows we’re more likely to keep habits23 that are tied to cultural milestones. So connecting practices to preexisting traditions can make them easier to stick to. Daily? Link it to sunrise or sunset, dinners, or bedtime. Weekly? Make it your own contemporary TGIF or Sabbath observance. Monthly? Connect it to the lunar cycle or the first or last days of the calendar. Seasonal? Solstices, equinoxes, Christmas, Easter, July Fourth, and Halloween all work and often come with vacation days attached. Annual? Take your pick: birthdays, anniversaries, New Year’s, back to school, whatever’s significant to you.

  For the daily practices, you’re trying to create self-propelling rituals so you will do them often enough to build a solid foundation. By hitching them to constant time slots and locations, you automate your positive behavior without having to draw down limited supplies of willpower. For the stickier (and likely, more enjoyable) weekly, monthly, and annual practices, you’re putting in buffers to ensure you don’t do them too much.

  Step Five: Lastly, remember you’re playing with addictive neurochemistry and deeply rooted evolutionary drivers. So, as your practices start building momentum, how do you know if you’re pursuing a deliberate path or becoming a bliss junkie? Short answer? You don’t.

  Long answer: Once a year, set your indulgences up on a shelf, go thirty days cold turkey, and use this time to recalibrate. Attach the hiatus to traditional seasons of forbearance—Lent, Yom Kippur, Ramadan—or impose your own.

  When you return to your practices, you’ve got perspective on how sticky things can get, and more feedback to fine-tune your calendar. Simply move any problematic activity to the right. If daily was too much, do it weekly. If quarterly practice leaves you wobbly, make it an annual event. Trade the morality of “should I or shouldn’t I” for the logic of “more often” or “less often.”

  Altered states are an information technology and what you’re after is quality data. If you spend all of your time blissed out, zenned out, drunk, stoned, sexed up, or anything else, then you’ve lost all the contrast that initially made those experiences so rich—what made them “altered” in the first place. By balancing inebriated abandon with monklike sobriety, ribald sexuality with introspective celibacy, and extreme risk-taking with cozy domesticity, you’ll create more contrast and spot patterns sooner.

  “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,”24 William Blake once wrote. Hedonic calendaring adds guardrails to that road. By dismantling the “oughts and “shoulds” of the orthodox approach, while avoiding the pitfalls of “if it feels good, do it” sensation seeking, we up the odds of getting to our destination in one piece.

  There Is a Crack in Everything

  If we can remember the known issues of STER, use the ecstasis equation to balance risk and reward, and deploy the hedonic calendar to avoid overheating, we should be good to go, right?

  Maybe.

  There’s one final caveat worth keeping in mind. Namely, there’s no escaping the human condition. We’re born, we die, and figuring out the in between can be brutal. As Hemingway reminds us,25 “the world breaks everyone.”

  Yet so many ecstatic traditions have promised to repeal that fundamental law. If we can only unlock the secret, they say, we will have everything we want without any of the suffering. Ironically, the attempt to avoid suffering often creates more of it, leaving us susceptible to the most predictable trap of all: spiritual bypassing. “[It’s] a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices,”26 says John Welwood, the psychologist who coined the term, “to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”
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  Typically, what gets bypassed on an ecstatic path are the mundane dissatisfactions of regular life. If those dissatisfactions are too intense, non-ordinary states can offer a tempting escape. But rather than bypassing these challenges, we can accept them and even draw power from them.

  This response has a paradoxical name: vulnerable strength. 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.”

  Balancing the bright lights of the ecstatic path with the darkness of the human condition is essential. Otherwise, we become unstable, top-heavy, our roots too shallow to ground us. The Indian philosopher Nisargadatta summed up the dilemma well: “Love tells me I am everything. Wisdom tells me I am nothing.28 And between these two banks, flows the river of my life.” If we map this idea onto what we know about nonordinary states, then Nisargadatta’s “everything/nothing” dialectic isn’t just flowery wisdom, it’s the by-product of the neurobiology of ecstasis itself.

  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 Japanese get at this same idea with the concept of wabi sabi30—or the ability to find beauty in imperfection. If a vase is accidentally broken, for example, they don’t throw the pieces away or try to patch it up to hide the accident. Instead, they take golden glue and painstakingly reassemble the vessel, so its unique flaws make the piece more beautiful.

  The late poet and musician Leonard Cohen may have been our greatest contemporary commentator on this theme. In his song “Anthem,” he sings: “Ring the bells that still can ring,31 forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. It’s where the light gets in.”

  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.

  Conclusion

  Row Your Boat or Fly Your Boat?

  In 2013, what Larry Ellison wanted, beyond all reason, was a win. So the founder of the software giant Oracle and one of the richest men1 in the world spent more than $10 million building the fastest boat ever to compete in the America’s Cup. The Oracle catamaran was equipped with futuristic hydrofoils that lifted the entire boat out of the water, enabling speeds of up to 55 knots. It defied all prior limits of wind-powered watercraft.

  But none of that technology helped the Oracle team beat the New Zealand boat in the first six races of the finals. Despite assembling a collection of software engineers to map and plan every detail, Ellison’s team was only one heat away from getting trounced by the upstart Kiwis. The races just weren’t playing out the way they had in their complex computer models.

  In fact, all of that expensive technology obscured what the skipper, Jimmy Spithill, knew in his bones—the New Zealand boat was killing them by sailing a radically different course. One of the hardest things to do efficiently in sailing is head into the direction the wind is coming from. It’s easy to get blown downwind—anyone with a canoe and a large trash bag can pull that off. But heading upwind requires precisely balancing the force in the sails against the resistance provided by the daggerboards (the large fins under the boat).

  Rather than the standard “high and slow” zigzag of the Oracle team, where they sailed about 45 degrees into the wind, the Kiwis had broken with convention and were sailing “low and fast”—50 or even 60 degrees off the direction of the wind. By doing that, their boat was able to pop up on its hydrofoils and rip along nearly 30 percent faster than their competition. Sure, they had to cover a little more ground, but they were doing it at warp speed.

  Down six races and with nothing left to lose, Spithill defied Ellison and fired his tactician. For the remainder of the finals, he sacrificed precious upwind headway to capitalize on the efficiencies that the hydrofoils afforded. Once he threw out the old conventions and adapted to the true potential of his boat, he skippered Oracle to eight straight wins and the greatest comeback in the oldest international sporting event in history.

  A similar choice faces us today. Just as adding hydrofoils to the Cup boats changed what was possible on (and just above) the water, unprecedented access to ecstasis has changed what is possible in our lives. Experiencing the selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness of nonordinary states of consciousness can accelerate learning, facilitate healing, and provide measurable impact in our lives and work. But we have to revise our tactics and upend convention to make the most of those advantages.

  Just as old sailing wisdom favored “high and slow”—meaning that you pointed your boat as close to the eventual upwind destination as possible—we are steeped in a “high and slow” culture of relentless goal setting and linear forward progress. It’s why, in the United States, more than half of paid vacation days go unclaimed and we perversely brag about clocking 60–80-hour workweeks (even though our effectiveness drops after 50 hours). We valorize suffering and sacrifice, even when the victories they provide are hollow.

  Surrendering any of that hard-fought ground to pursue nonordinary states can seem, at first glance, irresponsible, or, at a minimum, deeply counterintuitive. Spithill learned that the performance gains of hydrofoiling were so pronounced that if he didn’t change how he navigated, he’d lose to those who did.

  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.

  An Afterthought

  While most schoolchildren can recall the broad outlines of the story of Prometheus stealing fire and getting chained to a rock, few of us know why he did it, what came next, or what it might tell us about the road ahead.

  Back in mythic prehistory, Zeus hadn’t always been king. He’d had to battle a race of giants, the Titans, to claim his throne on Olympus. And when he won, he banished all of them, except for two young brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, whom he charged with making all the living creatures on the earth.

  Epimetheus, whose name means “afterthought,” started making animals2 out of river clay and bestowing on them all the gifts that Zeus had allotted: strength, speed, fangs, and fur. But he worked so hastily that by the time Prometheus had finished fashioning humans into the likeness of gods, there were no more advantages to bestow. It was then that Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” took pity on man, shivering and defenseless in the dark, and asked Zeus if he could give them fire to compensate. Zeus sa
id no, Prometheus stole fire anyway, and got punished. That’s the part we all remember. But Zeus wasn’t finished with the humans, or the brothers.

  He wanted to make sure that no one challenged his power ever again. So he made a woman, Pandora, whose name means “all giving,” and gave her a box filled with the tragedies of life to unleash on the world. Prometheus, true to his name, was cautious about accepting a gift from Zeus, but the more impulsive Epimetheus fell hard for the beautiful girl and they married.

  Eventually—as Zeus knew she would—Pandora gave in to her curiosity and opened the box. When she did, all the scourges of existence—war, pestilence, famine, greed—flew out to torment mankind. At the last minute, though, Pandora managed to snap the lid shut, leaving one thing remaining: hope. “That is why,” explained the Greek storyteller3 Aesop, “hope alone is still found among the people, promising that she will bestow on each of us the good things that have gone away.”

  Only now, our hope isn’t as blind as it used to be. We don’t have to keep making sacrifices to powers beyond our understanding or keep waiting for rescue from our plight. Today, a string of modern-day Prometheans have taken up the torch. Rather than relying on a singular emissary, we can draw information and inspiration from a global network of pioneers and innovators. And this ups our odds considerably. From 3D chem printers allowing us to explore our minds, to full-spectrum sexuality letting us lose ourselves in each other, to transformative technologies nudging us into clearer self-awareness, to giant gatherings providing a taste of communitas, the four forces have unlocked the gates of Olympus. And this may offer the greatest hope of all. We no longer have to rely on someone stealing fire for us.

  Finally, we can kindle that flame ourselves.