Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal

Author:Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal [Kotler, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-02-20T22:00:00+00:00

Part Three

The Road to Eleusis

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

—William Blake

Chapter Eight

Catch a Fire

The Sandbox of the Future

If gizmos and gadgets are your thing, then the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is your pilgrimage. If it’s superheroes and graphic novels, then it’s San Diego’s Comic-Con. But if you’re stalking ecstasis, if you want to see the four forces cranked up and deployed for full effect, then head out to that same desert festival Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to screen Eric Schmidt—Burning Man.

Every year, some three hours northeast of Reno, on a vast alkali flat known as the Black Rock Desert, you’ll find all the major players from Part Two of this book. There’s Tony Andrews in purple paisley, bumping bass out of a Funktion-One art car. Mikey Siegel’s around, too, demonstrating neurofeedback to the dusty and the curious. Android Jones has erected a giant dome to display his trance-inducing visionary art. There are workshops by world-renowned sex therapists, lectures on neurotheology by Ivy League scientists, and every head-bending alphabetamine Sasha Shulgin ever dreamed up. Off in the distance, you might even spot the Red Bull Air Force, dressed up in flaming costumes and wingsuiting into the city. Whatever else can be said about the event, Burning Man holds the undisputed title as the world’s largest ecstatic trade show.

“Burning Man aggressively extends the tradition of hedonic ecstasy,”1 writes Erik Davis. “[Wild] visuals, disorienting sonics, and a self-conscious excess of sensory stimulation . . . all help undermine stabilized frames. . . . [It’s a] full-sensorium brain machine designed to bring us in tune with our mind’s ongoing construction of real-time on the fly.”

Michael Michaels, one of Burning Man’s original founders2 (and known as “Danger Ranger” at the event), explains it this way: “At Burning Man, we’ve found a way to break out of the box that confines us. What we do, literally, is take people’s reality and break it apart. Burning Man is a transformation engine—it has hardware and it has software, you can adjust it and tweak it. And we’ve done that. We take people out to this vast dry place, nowhere, very harsh conditions. It strips away their luggage, the things they’ve brought with them, of who they thought they were. And it puts them in a community setting where they have to connect with each other, in a place where anything is possible. In doing so, it breaks their old reality and helps them realize they can create their own.” In other words, it’s a transformation engine tailor-made to invoke the selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness of STER.

Increasingly, that transformation engine has been producing real change in the world. And that’s the point of this chapter. If the past section examined the emergence of the four forces, this one asks the next obvious question: is the radical inspiration the forces provide leading to practical innovation? Earlier we explored studies that demonstrated nonordinary states can meaningfully boost creativity and problem solving under controlled conditions.

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