Branson and Mai Tai are taking this same approach to host the Carbon Warroom, a transnational organization35 dedicated to energy sustainability in the Caribbean, and the Blockchain Summit, an international consortium exploring socially beneficial applications for alternative currencies. By bringing the passionate and talented together to play and work, they’re charting a course toward a more innovative and sustainable future.
Case in point: a cedar hot tub perched on the crow’s nest of the main house of Necker Island. Guests gather there to soak, talk, and gaze at the stars, and it was at one of those late-night gatherings that Branson birthed his most ambitious company yet. “That’s where I had the idea for Virgin Galactic,”36 he reflects. “NASA hadn’t yet created a spaceship I could fly on and, if I waited too long, I wouldn’t be around. So, I thought, let’s build our own. I mean, who in their right mind wouldn’t look up at those stars and not dream of going there?”
And getting innovators into their “right minds” is what Summit, MaiTai, and Branson have done so well. By realizing that non-ordinary states are more than just a recreational diversion and can, in fact, heighten trust, amplify cooperation, and accelerate breakthroughs, a new generation of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and activists is fundamentally disrupting business as usual.
High Times on Main Street
If the only evidence of the four forces showing up in the world was to be found at exotic gatherings for a fortunate few, their impact would remain severely constrained: “trickle-down ecstasis.” But what is emerging is more varied than that. The ripple effects of these innovators’ companies and projects are even beginning to show up on Main Street itself—and they’re following a predictable pattern of dissemination.
In his seminal book37 Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore outlined exactly how new ideas gain traction. At first, when breakthroughs happen, only those people willing to tolerate the risk and uncertainty of a novel technology get on board, a trade they’ll make for the benefits of being “early adopters.” Then there’s a gap, what Moore called “the chasm,” that any idea has to cross to attract a growing audience. It’s attracting that “early majority” on the far side of the chasm that he feels is the true mark of disruptive innovation.
Up until now, we’ve focused primarily on the pioneers and early adopters—those most visibly driving the evolution of the four forces. Here we want to take a moment to catalog signs of broader applications, focusing on the places where the chasm has been crossed and a critical early majority are starting to incorporate state-changing tools and techniques into their everyday lives.
Take the first force, psychology. Thanks to the work of Martin Seligman and others, a new generation of positive psychologists is repackaging meditation, stripping out its spiritual connotations, and providing evidenced-based validation for its benefits. This new version, known as mindfulness-based stress reduction, is gaining traction in places that would never have embraced earlier variants. Eighteen million Americans now have a regular practice,38 and, by the end of 2017, 44 percent of all U.S. companies will offer mindfulness39 training to employees. Since rolling out their program, Aetna estimates40 that it’s saved $2,000 per employee in health-care costs, and gained $3,000 per employee in productivity. This quantifiable return on investment helps explain why the meditation and mindfulness industry grew to nearly $1 billion41 in 2015. What had been the domain of seekers and swamis is now a staple of HR.
And the impact of positive psychology is spreading well beyond the workplace. At Harvard, professor Tal Ben Shahar’s42 course on happiness is the most popular in the university’s history, while mainstream books on the science of well-being consistently top the bestseller lists. And this focus on optimal living isn’t just bettering our mood; it’s advancing our growth. One of Bob Kegan’s graduate students recently determined that by college, many Millennials have reached stages of adult development43 (with all their associated increases in capacity) that took their parents until middle age to attain.
We’re seeing similar progress in neurobiology. Legitimized by discoveries in embodied cognition, contemplative physical practices like yoga, tai chi, and qigong have become the most popular indoor activities in the United States. Consider yoga. This five-thousand-year-old tradition was a countercultural pastime until the 1990s. But once researchers began finding the practice did everything44 from improve cognitive function to decrease blood pressure, the general public started to cross the chasm. As of 2015, some 36 million Americans have a regular practice.45 An activity that changes our state of mind by changing the shape of our bodies has become more popular, in terms of participation, than football.46
On the higher-tech end of the spectrum, state-changing treatments like transcranial magnetic stimulation are now outperforming antidepressants, and many Silicon Valley executives are going off-label, using the technology to ‘“defrag’” their mental hard drives and boost performance. Companies like Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Executive are helping people biohack their daily lives with everything from smart sensors to nootropics (brain stimulating supplements). This market is expanding so rapidly that Bulletproof has grown into a nine-figure enterprise47 in less than four years and hundreds of other companies are flooding into the market.
In pharmacology, we’re increasingly accepting of substances that shift our consciousness. Marijuana, once called a “demon weed,” has become the fastest-growing industry48 in America. The whole of the cannabis economy49 (including legal and medical) is now worth roughly $6.2 billion, and slated to rise to $22 billion by 2020. As of late 2016, twenty-eight states have legalized medical marijuana, and eight of them—Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, California, Massachusetts, and Alaska, and the District of Columbia—have legalized recreational use as well. Over the next five years, researchers believe another fourteen states will follow suit. As Peter Reuter, a University of Maryland drug policy professor, recently told CNN,50 “I’m surprised by the long-term increase in support for marijuana legalization. It’s unprecedented. It doesn’t look like a blip.”
And cannabis is merely the most obvious sign of this change. Whether we’re examining psychedelics like LSD or empathogens like MDMA, mind-altering drugs are more popular than at any other time in history. Thirty-two million Americans use psychedelics51 on a regular basis (that’s nearly one in ten) and report considered reasons for doing so. According to a 2013 study published in a journal of the National Institutes of Health,52 the most common motivations are to “enhance mystical experiences, introspection and curiosity.” Transcendence, not decadence, appears to be driving use forward.
Technology has seen similar developments. A few decades ago, brain imaging devices were multimillion-dollar machines available in only a handful of university labs. Today they’ve become as ubiquitous and accessible as the smartphones in our pockets. With a handful of plug-and-play sensors, we can now measure hormones, heart rates, brainwaves, and respiration and get much clearer pictures of our real-time health.
In the summer of 2016, for example, Jay Blahnik, the lead designer of the Apple Watch, gave us an early look at their product road map. Over the next few years the watch will connect these sensors to become a platform for open-source research into everything from obesity to peak performance. In one twenty-four-hour beta test, more than thirty thousand people volunteered to contribute their personal data to Alzheimer’s research, making it four times the size of the next-largest study overnight.
And Apple is only part of a larger trend. Between 2000 and 2009, companies filed fewer than four hundred patents for neurotech.53 That number doubled in 2010, and doubled again in 2016. With the data these devices are providing, we can shortcut our way not only to better health, but to deeper self-awareness, taking weeks and months to train what used to take yogis and monks decades to master.
While these are all examples of the four forces reaching deeper into the mainstream majority, they may already seem unremarkable. There’s a reason for this. Ray Kurzweil, the
director of engineering at Google, once pointed out that it’s hard for nonscientists to track progress in artificial intelligence because, when it shows up in the real world, “it looks like nothing fancier than a talking ATM.”
It’s true for ecstasis as well. Soccer moms with Kundalini yoga practices; business men microdosing psychedelics; tech nerds tracking biometrics, The Simpsons going to Burning Man—these developments might seem pedestrian. But they are the “talking ATM’s” of altered states. They are proof that the chasm has been crossed, that the once cutting-edge is now integrated into the everyday.
Nothing New Under the Sun
Under the hot August sun, in the western wilds of America, tens of thousands of misfits gather to worship and celebrate. These seekers are there because they reject the stuffiness of their parents’ religion but are equally uninspired by the godlessness of their transient society. They crave direct mystical experience, and they have come together to find it.
They stay up all night dancing,54 playing music, getting intoxicated, and crowding together to see the headlining performers. Standing on giant scaffolds, these artists whip the crowds into a collective trance. When the mood takes them—and it often does—attendees have sex under the open sky.
Afterward, when they go back to their regular lives, they transform the world as they know it. On fire with their recent initiation, they challenge existing social, political and spiritual conventions. So noticeable are their efforts that the towns and cities where they congregate are called “burned-over” districts.
There was a time and a place when this all happened, but it wasn’t the present day and it wasn’t the Black Rock Desert. The date was 1801; the place was Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The occasion was the Second Great Awakening, one of the largest spiritual revivals in American history.
The ink was barely dry on the Constitution, and the western boundary of the United States reached only as far as the Appalachians, but already the foundation of a vibrant American ecstatic tradition was being laid. Those gathered in Cane Ridge were part of the largest revival of that era. More than twenty thousand settlers camped out, listening to itinerant preachers who stood on elevated platforms to speak to the frenzied crowds of the coming Rapture. In between sermons, people hung out by their tents and lean-tos, with fiddles and banjos, playing the Scots-Irish tunes that would later become bluegrass music. And despite the ostensibly pious intent of the gathering, there was plenty of drinking and fornicating. Even back then, the “Holy Ghost feeling” was tough to keep under wraps.
These revivals offered connection and community in a world that felt fragmented and hectic. Over the next half century, an entire generation of the young and passionate joined in. The Second Great Awakening gave birth to social justice movements ranging from temperance and women’s rights to abolition. It infused American politics with an activist conscience for years to come. Even Joseph Smith’s hilltop epiphany took place in one of those “burned-over” districts.
So as we consider the emergence of the four forces and where they lead, it can be helpful to realize that the revolution we’re experiencing today might be more the norm than the exception. American spirituality has always favored the direct over the inferred, the immediate over the gradual. It has always spilled over from the pews and pulpits into the towns and countrysides.
In this context, we could consider this current moment as a Great Awakening in its own right. Only this time, the mythical has been replaced by the empirical. From the Nevada desert and the disaster zones of the Gulf Coast and Afghanistan to the mountains of Utah and the sidewalks of Main Street, people are coming together to see for themselves. And what they’re discovering is that there’s more capacity, resilience, innovation, and creativity in all of us collectively than in any of us alone. That’s as significant today as it was over two hundred years ago. So even if there really is “nothing new under the sun,” each time it rises, it’s still a sight to see.
Chapter Nine
Burning Down the House
Even though a critical mass of the population may be crossing the chasm, and incorporating the benefits of nonordinary states into their lives and work, that doesn’t mean this revolution won’t cause problems. Historically, every time ecstasis has shown up, it’s led to upheaval and misuse. That’s because, while the insights provided by the four forces may give us a better way to stabilize these experiences and lessen that risk, there will always be those who try to bend them to other ends.
Back in the section on Pipers, Cults and Commies we touched on these dangers, examining the pitfalls that nonordinary states can pose for individuals and groups—namely, the dual issues of coercion and persuasion. Here we’re going to expand that thread by focusing on two of the institutions with the most vested interest in coercion and persuasion today: the military and marketers.
We’ll start with militarization, reviewing more than half a century of government attempts to weaponize consciousness. Then we’ll move into commercialization, where the power of ecstasis is being used to open our wallets. This latter category is a more recent development, to be sure, but one with a high potential for abuse. In both cases, we’ll see how the application of nonordinary states, as with other powerful technologies, has both ethical and political ramifications.
The Atomic Donkey
It was 1953 and the Pentagon had a problem.1 Colonel Frank Schwable, a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, had been shot down over North Korea, appeared on Chinese radio, and confessed that he’d been ordered to deploy biological weapons. The event was a PR nightmare. If the Pentagon let Schwable’s story stand, they’d be caught in violation of the Geneva Convention; if they discredited his account, they’d be undermining a decorated officer and prisoner of war.
So the Secretary of Defense demanded,2 as Annie Jacobsen recounts in her recent book, The Pentagon’s Brain, “an all-out campaign to smear the Koreans [with] a new form of war crime, and a new form of refinement in atrocity techniques, namely mind murder, or ‘menticide.’” If Schwable had been the victim of communist mind murder, then his testimony could be invalidated and his patriotism upheld—a tidy solution to a messy problem.
Menticide, most in the Pentagon agreed, was a clunky word. But the CIA had been discreetly testing3 a more compelling tagline in New York Times op-eds: “brainwashing.” This one stuck. Brainwashing neatly encapsulated one of the deepest fears of the Cold War era—the idea that your very individuality, your own free will, could be hijacked by a totalitarian state.
The CIA sowed the specter of brainwashing so successfully in the minds of the American public and within its own operational culture that it came to be considered one of the primary threats of the Cold War. So even though they’d dreamed up this bogeyman themselves, perfecting mind-control devices and drugs to combat it became a top-secret, top priority.
Not long after Schwable’s radio announcement, the Department of Defense got wind that a brilliant young University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist4 might have discovered the very technology they’d been seeking. Representatives from nearly every government agency—the CIA, NSA, FBI, Army, Navy, Air Force, and the State Department—all beat a path to Dr. John Lilly’s door.
Lilly had solved the two biggest technical problems of mechanically inducing ecstasis5 on demand. The first was that inserting electrodes through the skull and into the brain invariably caused too much damage. The second was that pulsing unidirectional current across nerve endings tended to irreparably cook the circuitry.
But Lilly had developed tiny stainless-steel sleeves you could tap into a subject’s skull and then slip gossamer electrodes through, with virtually no swelling or lasting harm. He’d also built a machine that sent bidirectional electrical pulses through the brain that stimulated neurons without knocking them out of balance.The procedure itself was virtually painless—nothing more than pinpricks as the sleeve guides went in. The electrodes could be inserted to any depth in the brain, from the cortex down to the amygdala. And the guides co
uld remain embedded and undetected for months or even years.
In primates, Lilly had discovered6 that the pleasure system—what could be called the brain’s basic ecstatic circuitry—correlated directly with the sexual arousal network. Male monkeys trained to use his device for self-stimulation would choose to orgasm nonstop for sixteen hours, followed by eight hours of deep sleep, after which they would get right back to it. Pleasure, Lilly had discovered, was an endlessly motivating and potentially all-consuming pursuit (at least in males).
For this reason, when the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) told him to brief the Pentagon on his work, Lilly expressed concern. “Anybody with the proper apparatus can carry this out on a human being covertly,”7 he recounted in his autobiography, The Scientist. “If this technique got into the hands of a secret agency they would have total control over a human being and be able to change his beliefs extremely quickly, leaving little evidence of what they had done.”
To guard against this, Lilly detailed a series of nonnegotiable8 conditions under which he would be willing to discuss his findings. Nothing he said could ever be classified and everything shared would remain experimentally repeatable by him or his colleagues. Long before Linus Torvalds gave away the source code to Linux, or Sasha Shulgin published his chemical cookbook, or Elon Musk shared all of Tesla’s car and battery patents—long before there was even a term for it—Lilly took a stand for open-sourcing ecstasis.
What he hadn’t counted on was how relentless the military could be. Not long after that initial presentation,9 Lilly was contacted again, this time by an unnamed representative of the Sandia Corporation (a Lockheed Martin subsidiary and longtime defense contractor). He wanted “to learn the technique of inserting the sleeve guides into the heads of large animals.” Again, Lilly insisted on keeping the work declassified, but agreed to let the man come and film his latest experiments.
Stealing Fire Page 18
