Stealing Fire Read online

  Dedication

  To Julie, Lucas, and Emma, sine qua non.

  J.W.

  To William James, you got there first.

  S.K.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part One: The Case for Ecstasis Chapter One: What Is This Fire?

  Chapter Two: Why It Matters

  Chapter Three: Why We Missed It

  Part Two: The Four Forces of Ecstasis Chapter Four: Psychology

  Chapter Five: Neurobiology

  Chapter Six: Pharmacology

  Chapter Seven: Technology

  Part Three: The Road to Eleusis Chapter Eight: Catch a Fire

  Chapter Nine: Burning Down the House

  Chapter Ten: Hedonic Engineering

  Conclusion

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  A Quick Note on Inside Baseball

  Notes

  Index

  About the Authors

  Also by Steven Kotler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  The Never-Ending Story

  Some revolutions begin with a gunshot, others with a party. This one kicked off1 on a Friday night in downtown Athens, in 415 BCE. Alcibiades, a prominent Greek general2 and politician, had invited a small circle of friends to his villa for what was to become one of the more infamous bacchanals in history. Hooded in the stolen robes of a high priest, Alcibiades swept down his marble staircase, recited a forbidden incantation, and produced an ornate decanter. Carefully, he poured a single shot of a dark liquid into each guest’s glass. A few more words, an exuberant cheer, and everyone drained their cups.

  In less than an hour,3 the effects took hold. “Fears, terrors, quiverings, mortal sweats, and a lethargic stupor come and overwhelm us,” the historian Plutarch later recounted. “But, as soon as we are out of it, we pass into delightful meadows, where the purest air is breathed, where sacred concerts and discourses are heard; where, in short, one is impressed with celestial visions.”

  By sunup, those visions had faded, replaced by repercussions in the real world. Alcibiades’s illicit party kicked off a chain of events that would prompt him to flee Athens, dodge a death sentence, betray his government, and set in motion the trial and execution of his beloved teacher, Socrates.

  Famously handsome, eloquent, and ambitious, Alcibiades’s faults were as plentiful as his gifts. He offered sex to Socrates in exchange for the philosopher’s deepest secrets. Before his wife could divorce him for womanizing, he dragged her out of court by her hair. Politically, he played both sides against the middle, and his only true allegiance was to his career. So when his rivals got wind of that scandalous evening, they ratted him out to the highest Athenian court for stealing “kykeon,” the sacred elixir he’d shared with his guests. He was tried in absentia for a crime punishable by death—blaspheming the Mysteries.

  And not just any mysteries; the Eleusinian Mysteries,4 a two-thousand-year-old initiatory ritual that had an outsize impact on Western philosophy and counted some of Greece’s most famous citizens among its elect. Foundational notions like Plato’s world of forms and Pythagoras’s music of the spheres were informed by these rites. “Our Mysteries had a very real meaning,”5 Plato explained, “he that has been purified and initiated [at Eleusis] shall dwell with the gods.” Cicero went further,6 calling the rites the pinnacle of Greek achievement: “Among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which . . . Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than the Mysteries. . . . In [them] we perceive the real principles of life, and learn not only how to live in joy, but also to die with better hope.”

  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.”

  And so powerful was this experience and so significant were those insights that the Mysteries persisted for more than two thousand years. A lesser ritual would have fizzled or, at least, become an empty gesture devoid of its original power. Eleusis, historians tell us, endured time and turmoil for a couple of key reasons: First, initiates kept the mystery in the Mystery—disclosing any of its secrets, as Alcibiades did, was a capital offense. And second, kykeon, that dark liquid at the heart of the ritual, packed one hell of a punch.

  For anthropologists, uncovering the ingredients of kykeon has become a Holy Grail kind of quest. It ranks right up there with decoding soma, the ancient Indian sacrament that inspired Aldous Huxley’s groupthink happy drug in Brave New World. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann7 and Harvard-trained classicist Carl Ruck argued that the barley in kykeon might have been tainted with an ergot fungus. This same fungus generates lysergic acid (LSA), a precursor to the LSD that Hofmann famously synthesized in his Sandoz pharmaceutical lab. When consumed accidentally,8 ergot prompts delirium, prickly limbs, and the hallucinations known as “St. Anthony’s fire.” When taken on purpose, within the context of an intensive initiatory ritual, you have all the ingredients of a highly effective ecstatic technology—so effective (and, presumably, so enjoyable) that Alcibiades was willing to risk his life to steal it for a party.

  All of which is to say, as far back as we can trace Western civilization, buried among the stories that bore schoolchildren to tears, we find tales of rebel upstarts willing to bet it all for an altered state of consciousness. And this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s just an early indicator of a perennial pattern, hidden inside of history, tucked among the names and dates we know so well.

  At the center of this dynamic sits the myth of Prometheus,9 the original upstart rebel, who stole fire from the gods and shared it with humankind. And he didn’t just steal a book of matches, but also the power to seed civilization: language, art, medicine, and technology. Enraged that mortals would now have the same power as the gods, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, letting eagles rip out his innards for eternity.

  This story has continued to repeat itself throughout the ages. Typically, a rebel, seeker, or trickster steals fire from the gods. It can take the form of a potent celebratory rite, a heretical new scripture, an obscure spiritual practice, or a secret, state-changing technology. Whatever the case, the rebel sneaks the flame out of the temple and shares it with the world. It works. Things get exciting. Insights pile up. Then, inevitably, the party gets out of hand. The keepers of law and order—call them the priests—spot the hedonistic blaze, track down the thief, and shut down the show. And so it goes, until the next cycle begins.

  Stealing Fire is the story of the latest round in this cycle and, potentially, the first time in history we have a chance for a different ending. It’s the story of an entirely new breed of Promethean upstart—Silicon Valley executives, members of the U.S. special forces, maverick scientists, to name only a few—who are using ecstatic techniques to alter consciousness and accelerate performance. And the strangest part? It’s a revolution that’s been hiding in plain sight.

  Accidental Prometheans

  If a revolution is the kind of thing you can stumble upon, then we—your authors, Steven and Jamie—stumbled upon this one a few years ago. And really, we should have seen it coming.

  That’s because at the Flow Genome Project10 we study the relationship between altered states and peak performance, focused primarily on the experien
ce known as flow. Defined as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best,” flow refers to those “in the zone” moments where focus gets so intense that everything else disappears. Action and awareness start to merge. Our sense of self vanishes. Our sense of time as well. And all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.

  Scientists have known about the relationship11 between flow and peak performance for more than a century, but a real understanding of this relationship has been slow in coming. The main problem was conflicting motivations. The people really good at finding flow, mostly artists and athletes, were rarely interested in studying it. And the people interested in studying flow, primarily academics, were rarely good at finding it.

  “We founded the Flow Genome Project in an attempt to solve this problem. Our goal was to take a multidisciplinary approach to mapping the neurobiology of flow, and then open-source the results. But to do this, we had to establish a common language around these states. So Steven wrote The Rise of Superman, a book about the neuroscience of peak performance and action sports.

  Following the book’s release, we found ourselves talking flow with a wider and wider assortment of people. What began as meetings with individuals and organizations with a vested interest in high-stakes competition—professional athletes and the military—expanded into Fortune 500 companies, financial organizations, tech firms, health-care providers, and universities. The idea that nonordinary states of consciousness could improve performance was spreading out of the extreme and into the mainstream.

  But what caught our attention were the conversations we were having after those presentations. On too many occasions to count, people would pull us aside to tell us about their clandestine experiments with “ecstatic technologies.”12 We met military officers going on monthlong meditation retreats, Wall Street traders zapping their brains with electrodes, trial lawyers stacking off-prescription pharmaceuticals, famous tech founders visiting transformational festivals, and teams of engineers microdosing with psychedelics. In other words, everywhere we went, someone was trying to steal the kykeon.

  We wanted to know precisely where this trend was originating and exactly how these leaders were altering their mental states to enhance performance. So we lit out on the trail of these modern-day Prometheans. Over the last four years, this journey has led us all over the world13: to the Virginia Beach home of SEAL Team Six, to the Googleplex in Mountain View, to the Burning Man festival in Nevada, to Richard Branson’s Caribbean hideaway, to luxurious dachas outside Moscow, to Red Bull’s headquarters in Santa Monica, to Nike’s innovation team in Portland, to bio-hacking conferences in Pasadena, to private dinners with United Nations advisers in New York. And the stories that we heard stunned us.

  In their own ways, with differing languages, techniques, and applications, every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that altered states provide. They are deliberately cultivating these states to solve critical challenges and outperform their competition. It isn’t just grit, or better habits, or longer hours that are separating the best from the rest. To hear these trail-blazers tell it, the insights they receive in those states are what make all the difference. And unlike in earlier, more guarded eras, today they’re openly talking about their adventures. The ecstatics are coming out of the closet.

  Put all these experiences together and it’s beginning to seem like a Promethean uprising. Advances in science and technology are giving us unprecedented access to and insight about the upper range of human experience, arguably the most controversial and misunderstood territory in history. Around the world, revelers, soldiers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, technologists, and business leaders are leveraging these insights for a common goal: a glimpse above the clouds. First in isolation, then in increasing numbers, and now, if you know where to look, virtually everywhere you look. We are witnessing a groundswell, a growing movement to storm heaven and steal fire. It’s a revolution in human possibility.

  And this is a book about that revolution.

  Part One

  The Case for Ecstasis

  “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

  Chapter One

  What Is This Fire?

  The Switch

  One of the hardest parts of being a Navy SEAL1 isn’t knowing when to shoot; it’s knowing when not to shoot. And we know why. If you put a dozen guys in a dark room and arm them with automatic weapons, somebody’s going to blink. Or twitch. Then it’s game on. That’s what made capturing Al-Wazu2 such a challenge: more than anything else, the SEALs needed him alive.

  It was late September 2004, at a forward operating base in the northeastern corner of Afghanistan. A couple of dozen members of the elite SEAL Team Six, or, in their preferred parlance, DEVGRU, were stationed there, gathering intelligence and staging missions. Some six months prior, a radio operator had noticed a spike in Wazu chatter. Perhaps he was hiding in the woods to the south of them. Possibly he was in the mountains to the north. Then the rumors turned into facts. Wazu actually was in the woods and the mountains, holed up in an alpine forest some seventy miles west of their current position.

  For the SEALs, this wasn’t good news. The terrain to the west was high desert—lonely, barren, and rough. Not enough cover for a stealth mission. Under these conditions, there was no way to get in without a firefight; no guarantee they could capture Wazu alive.

  Though he was once a midlevel player, Al-Wazu’s notoriety had skyrocketed after he’d pulled off a feat no other Al-Qaeda operative had accomplished: an escape from an American detention center. This single act elevated him to the upper echelons of the organization, earning him a band of committed followers and that ultimate jihadi honor: a personal letter of commendation from Osama bin Laden.

  Ever since, Wazu had been busy: recruiting, raiding, and killing. That’s why the SEALs needed him alive. His value as an intelligence asset had quadrupled. There was enough in his head to take down most of the remaining cells in the area. Plus, the SEALs wanted to send a message.

  And that day in September, they got their chance. The radio call came in the afternoon: Al-Wazu was on the move. He’d come out of the woods and down from the mountains. He was heading straight for them.

  For the SEALs, this changed everything. With a moving target, the variables multiplied exponentially. Anything could happen. The team got together and combed through the mission. Contingency plans were put into place, details were committed to memory. Day turned into night and night rolled on.

  They only had five hours until dawn, and still no target. The SEALs needed the darkness. Their mission got much more complicated during the day. There were more people awake and more traffic on the roads and too many ways a suspect could disappear into a crowd.

  Then, after all that waiting, they suddenly had a target. Al-Wazu had stopped. Only a few hours of darkness remained and the SEALs couldn’t believe their luck. He’d holed up less than a mile from their current position—they could literally walk to the op.

  Commander Rich Davis (for security, not his real name) wasn’t sure it was luck. As the leader of this unit, he knew how badly his men wanted Al-Wazu. They were keyed up. A mile hike wasn’t much. Davis would have preferred a three-hour uphill slog. Three hours wouldn’t tire them out, but it might calm them down. Might help them focus. Might help them merge.

  The Greeks had a word3 for this merger that Davis quite liked—ecstasis—the act of “stepping beyond oneself.” Davis had his own word as well. He called it “the switch,” the moment they stopped being separate men with lives and wives and things that matter. The moment they became, well, there’s no easy way to explain it—but something happened out there.

  Plato described ecstasis as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanish
es completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence. Contemporary scientists have slightly different terms and descriptions. They call the experience “group flow.” “[It’s] a peak state,” explains psychologist Keith Sawyer in his book Group Genius,4 “a group performing at its top level of ability. . . . In situations of rapid change, it’s more important than ever for a group to be able to merge action and awareness, to adjust immediately by improvising.”

  Whatever the description, for the SEALs, once that switch was flipped, the experience was unmistakable. Their awareness shifted. They stopped acting like individuals, and they started operating as one—a single entity, a hive mind. In the high-stakes hot zone that is their job, this collective awareness is, as Davis says, “the only way to get the job done.”

  And isn’t that peculiar? It means that on the night in question, during a critical mission to capture and not to kill, an altered state was the only thing standing between Al-Wazu and a preemptive double tap to the chest. As isolated individuals, with fingers on the trigger, someone was bound to twitch. But as a team, thinking and moving together? Intelligence got multiplied, fear divided. The whole wasn’t just greater than the sum of its parts; it was smarter and braver too. So Commander Rich Davis wasn’t just hoping they’d flip the switch that evening; he was banking on it.

  “More than any other skill,” he explains, “SEALs rely on this merger of consciousness. Being able to flip that switch—that’s the real secret to being a SEAL.”

  The High Cost of Ninja Assassins

  It costs $25,000 to turn5 an average Joe into a combat-ready U.S. Marine. SEALs, meanwhile, cost a lot more. Estimates for eight weeks6 of Navy basic training, six months of underwater demolition training, six months of advanced skills training, and eighteen months of predeployment platoon training—that is, what it takes to get a SEAL ready for combat—total out to roughly $500,000 per head. Which is to say, the Navy SEALs are among the most expensive collections of warfighters ever assembled.