A few years later, Harper’s Magazine wrote an in-depth piece on Sandia10 detailing their “super mule” project—a donkey/horse hybrid equipped with electrode implants and a solar compass. The mule carried its load, quite likely a suitcase nuke, in an exact straight line, regardless of terrain. If it veered, it was punished with pain. If it tracked, it was rewarded with pleasure. As he read the piece, Lilly was shocked to recognize a photo of the man who had filmed his experiment. Sandia had managed to take mechanically induced ecstasis and harness it to wage nuclear war.
Devastated, Lilly realized that before he could complete his research, government agencies were going to co-opt it. He disavowed experimenting on animal or human test subjects, concluding that self-experimentation was the only ethical way to explore the boundaries of the mind. He left the NIMH and ceased all research with “neuro-physiological aids.” Yet, despite his abandoning his position and his funding, and risking his reputation and ultimately his life, Lilly’s work would prove endlessly fascinating to the military and intelligence communities for decades to come.
He Who Controls the Switch
In 2010, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, discovered that information technologies, ranging from the telegraph to radio, movies, and ultimately, the internet, tend to behave in similar ways—starting out utopian and democratic and ending up centralized and hegemonic. In his book The Master Switch, Wu calls this “the Cycle,” a recurring battle between access and control that shows up whenever these breakthroughs emerge. “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,”11 he explains, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from [an] open to closed system.”
When radio operators began stringing up towers in the early 1920’s, for example, it was so people could talk to each other and share ideas over an open broadcast medium. “All these disconnected communities and houses will be united through radio12 as they were never united by the telegraph and telephone,” wrote Scientific American. But that’s not what ended up happening.
By the mid 1920’s, AT&T and RCA teamed up to create the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), controlling access to bandwidth and creating a massive multinational company that persists to this day. By the 2000’s, another juggernaut, Clear Channel Communications, controlled market share and playlists in more than thirty countries. This was unification, for certain, but not of the democratizing variety imagined by the early pioneers.
Because of the inevitability of the Cycle, Wu believes there’s no question more important than who owns the platform—the means by which people access and share information. It’s what prompted him to coin the term “net neutrality” back in 2003 and spawn an ongoing conversation about the balance of civic and corporate power online. It’s also where he got the title of his 2010 book. “Before any question of free speech,13” he writes, “comes the question of ‘who controls the master switch?’”
While information technologies started out concrete and physical—ranchers putting up telegraph wire to connect their farms to town, and radio stations building giant AM antennas—they’re getting increasingly virtual: the ones and zeroes of the internet and the infinite complexities of Google’s search algorithms. And with the four forces, information technology is moving from the virtual to the perceptual.
Ecstatic technology isn’t limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly’s early research established, it’s the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness. And that final step—the richness? That’s the information that we can’t normally access. As W. B. Yeats put it,14 “The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
Once information technology become perceptual—as in the case of nonordinary states—the Cycle becomes even more powerful. Our mind becomes the platform. The tug-of-war between access and control becomes a battle for cognitive liberty. And while nation states have consistently sought to regulate external chemicals that shape consciousness, what happens when they attempt to regulate internal neurochemistry?
If that sounds far-fetched, consider that elite athletes already submit “biological passports” to the World Anti-Doping Agency15 to confirm their unique baselines for hormones, blood profiles, and neurochemicals. If they fluctuate from that baseline without official permission, they are penalized and even brought up on criminal charges. Much in the same way that regimes used to declare certain books subversive, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a government declaring certain brain chemistry subversive. A telltale combination of neurotransmitters coursing through your bloodstream could be enough to get put on a watch list, or worse.
So while it’s tempting to herald the four forces as a development that is going to unlock ecstasis for the masses, we’d be naïve to think that a persistent historical pattern—the battle for control of the Master Switch—won’t apply this time around.
Spooks to Kooks
The struggle over Lilly’s brain stimulation device was an early example of the Cycle in action—of whether an ecstatic technology could remain freely accessible, or would end up centrally controlled. Since then, that struggle has evolved into a decades-long game of cat-and-mouse between the “spooks” of the intelligence community and the “kooks” of the counterculture. Scientists like Lilly repeatedly pioneered new techniques to alter consciousness just in time to have the government attempt to weaponize them. Or the spooks worked on some new top-secret application, only to have it leak out and get repurposed by the kooks. And while some of the stories we’ll cover in this section may sound so outlandish they stretch credulity, they consistently underscore Wu’s thesis, the high-stakes game of who controls the Master Switch.
It turns out that more than a few of those Pentagon officials who came knocking on Lilly’s door were funded by the CIA. They were part of MK-ULTRA, arguably the largest and most notorious brainwashing project in U.S. history. Some eighty institutions, including universities, colleges, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies, took part. Their goal was to find chemicals that could control and confuse enemy combatants, civilian populations, and heads of state—including one Spy vs. Spy plan to slip Fidel Castro an LSD-soaked cigar.16
“Within the CIA itself, [agents] were taking LSD regularly,17 tripping at the office, at Agency parties, measuring their mental equilibrium against those of their colleagues,” Jay Stevens recounts in Storming Heaven. “Turn your back in the morning and some wiseacre would slip a few micrograms into your coffee. It was a game played with the most exalted of weapons, the mind, and sometimes embarrassing things happened. Case-hardened spooks would break down crying or go all gooey about the ‘brotherhood of man.’”
In addition to these frat-boy antics, the program engaged in more serious lapses in judgment. They repeatedly dosed mental patients and prompted one of their own, a chemist at Fort Detrick’s Biological Weapons Center,18 to jump or get thrown (the evidence is conflicting) out a thirteenth-story New York City hotel window. And, in the annals of unintended consequences, MK-ULTRA gets a notable mention for accidentally unleashing a leviathan: the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s.
Almost exactly twenty-five hundred years after Alcibiades’s first stole kykeon, a young student named Ken Kesey poached some too—only this time it was from the CIA. Like Alcibiades, Kesey was disarmingly persuasive and controversial, wangling his way to a tuition-free spot in a graduate writing seminar at Stanford and enduring a criminal trial and exile of his own. Just as Socrates had doubted whether Alcibiades was a worthy pupil, Wallace Stegner, the literary lion who headed the writing department at Stanford, didn’t think much of Kesey, either. Stegner dismissed him as “a sort of highly talented illiterate”19 and “a threat to civilization and
intellectualism and sobriety.” Which as it turns out, wasn’t far off.
As background research for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was set in a mental institution, Kesey had been volunteering at a U.S. Veterans Administration hospital (which, unbeknownst to the young author and many of the administering doctors, was part of MK-ULTRA). To earn a little extra money, a friend of his had turned him onto the $75 per session experiments the docs were running there on “psychomimetic” drugs—meaning chemicals like LSD that mimicked the mental breakdown of psychosis. The scientists “didn’t have the guts to do it themselves,”20 Kesey later told Stanford Alumni magazine, “so they hired students. When we came back out [of the sessions], they took one look at us and said, ‘Whatever they do, don’t let them go back in that room!’”
Over on Perry Lane, the bohemian cottage enclave where he lived, Kesey and his growing band of pranksters took things out of the lab and into the field. “Volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science21 at the Menlo Park vets hospital,” Tom Wolfe recounts in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “and somehow drugs were getting up and walking out of there and over to Perry Lane.”
“Half the time,” Wolfe continues, “Perry Lane would be like some kind of college fraternity row22 with everybody out on a nice autumn Saturday afternoon on the grass . . . playing touch football . . . an hour later Kesey and his circle would be hooking down something that in the entire world only they and a few other avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers even knew about.”
What happened next became the well-documented subject of counterculture lore. Kesey moved the experiment into the hills above Palo Alto, Hunter S. Thompson, the Hells Angels, and Neal Cassady (from Kerouac’s On the Road fame) all showed up, as did a strange little band called the Grateful Dead, led by a chinless but oddly magnetic guitarist named Jerry Garcia. Armed with gallons of day-glo paint,23 strobe lights, and the prototypical art car, a tricked out 1939 International Harvester bus named “Further,” Kesey and his Merry Pranksters birthed West Coast psychedelic culture. Control of the Master Switch had been wrestled away from the spooks, and neither Silicon Valley nor the wider world would ever be the same.
Over the next decade, Eastern mysticism, liberated sexuality, and “following your bliss” mounted a direct challenge to the traditional values of mainstream America. “But, while the kooks were enthusiastically sharing esoteric techniques with a broader audience, the spooks never lost interest in the movement they had accidentally birthed. By the mid-1970’s, Watergate had broken, Saigon had fallen, and a demoralized Defense Department was in serious need of inspiration. “A round of post-Vietnam soul-searching,”24 Fortune reported, “culminated in the establishment of Task Force Delta, a cadre of army officers whose mission was to scan for new ideas.” No one was better at scanning for those ideas than Jim Channon, a lieutenant colonel in the Army and veteran of two tours of duty in Vietnam. “I just made it my weekend duty to get around all of these places, like Esalen, make friends and find out what this esoteric technology really was.”25
By the time he’d finished his hot tubs and crystals junket, Channon had, for all intents and purposes, gone native. He penned The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual,26 making the case that deliberately cultivating nonordinary states, including the ability to experience universal love, to perceive auras, to have out of body experiences, to see into the future, and, perhaps most memorably, “to encounter the enemy with sparkly eyes”—could transform the military.
And as far out (and dated) as this sounds, Channon’s manifesto took on fabled status among progressive thinkers in the military. In “Beam Me Up Spock: The New Mental Battlefield,”27 a 1980 article for the staid journal, Military Review, Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander argued that “a new battlefield dimension that may defy our general perceived concepts of time and space looms on the horizon. Clearly, psychotronic (mind/matter) weapons already exist; only their capabilities are in doubt.” Even the U.S. Army’s famous “Be All You Can Be” slogan sprang from Task Force Delta’s mission to unlock human potential.
A couple of years later, the Pentagon commissioned the Trojan Warrior Project, an intensive six-month training in mind-body-spirit practice for Green Berets. The program included meditating with a Tibetan lama, neuro and biofeedback sessions in a cutting-edge computer lab, praying with a Benedictine monk, and training in aikido, a Japanese martial art dedicated to universal peace. It was a frontal assault on the neurophysiology of ecstasis (and the direct progenitor of the SEALs’ Mind Gym). For their coat of arms, they combined ancient and pop mythologies: a wooden horse sat above two crossed light sabers. Their motto? Vi Cit Tecum—“May the Force Be with You.”
While this progressive era produced some undeniable “white hat” dividends—ranging from mindfulness and stress reduction programs for the general enlisted to martial arts training in the Marine Corps—there were also some “black hat” applications. In his manual, Channon had lobbied for the calming, soothing, and inspiring capacities of music, hoping that bass, not bombs, would prevail on the battlefield of the future. Almost as an afterthought, he’d added that, if all else failed,28 “unpleasant, discordant sounds could be used to disorient enemy combatants.”
But that afterthought got noticed. In May 2003, Newsweek ran a short blurb “PSYOPS: Cruel and Unusual,”29 revealing that U.S. military detention units were using a combination of bright light, disorienting sounds, and other consciousness-shifting tactics to break Iraqi prisoners. “Trust me, it works,” says one U.S. operative. “In training, they forced me to listen to the Barney ‘I Love You’ song for 45 minutes. I never want to go through that again.”
That was the sound bite that launched a thousand clips. But rather than acknowledging the military’s ethically questionable interrogation tactics, the news cycle spun happily on, with TV hosts inserting a “Barney is torture for us too” gag right in between footage of pandas at the zoo and the local weather. What began as an attempt to infuse the military with the idealism of the human potential movement had devolved into a tool for psychological warfare—and the Cycle churned on.
And it’s still churning today. Consider the government’s clandestine role at Burning Man. On the surface, the festival— a one-week gathering on an utterly forgettable patch of U.S. Bureau of Land Management desert—is not what you’d consider a “high-value target.” But for the short few days of its existence, the event holds the dubious distinction of being one of the most surveilled cities in the country. Despite experiencing less violent crime than most midsize suburbs, it draws over a dozen separate state and federal agencies equipped with millions of dollars of high-tech spy gear, infrared goggles, tactical vehicles, and undercover agents.
In heavily redacted documents recently released through the Freedom of Information Act,30 it turns out that the FBI has conducted a multiyear intelligence program at Burning Man. The official reason was to scout for domestic terrorists and track potential threats from Islamic extremists. More likely, the FBI was taking a page out of their old COINTELPRO playbook,31 the one used in the 1960’s to infiltrate and destabilize the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and the American Indian Movement. If that were the case, then one would expect increased surveillance of the event, heightened policing, insertion of agents provocateurs, and aggressive prosecution of nonviolent crimes. And while it’s hard to tell if it’s an anomaly or the beginning of a trend,32 in 2015, plainclothes and undercover agents spiked, and arrests at the festival were up 600 percent.
It seems safe to say that the intelligence community knows something big is happening out in the desert, they just can’t quite figure out what. That’s because, other than the obvious external cues—the fiery explosions, wild costumes, and all-night dance parties—what’s really going on is happening in people’s minds. To the rank-and-file law enforcement monitoring, “the festival, it must seem like a rowdier Mardi Gras, or a Times Square New Year’s with fewer drunks and more hugging." But not s
o for the top brass. In some instances, as we saw when Camp PlayaGon commandeered a spy satellite, and the Supreme Commander of NATO attended the event, they’re in on it.
And this repeated pattern of the “spooks lying down with the kooks,” from hippie float tanks at the SEALs’ Mind Gym, to Kesey’s misadventures at the V.A. hospital, to Lieutenant Colonel Channon hottubbing at Esalen, to the Pentagon at Burning Man, clearly highlights the back and forth contest for control of the Master Switch. More critically, it illustrates one of the central challenges of ecstasis: how to ensure that powerful techniques for altering consciousness don’t get used for the wrong reasons.
To note that “a tool is morally neutral” is a standby of college philosophy papers, but in the case of ecstatic technologies, it’s unsettlingly true. As we saw in earlier chapters, fully expressed ecstasis tends to promote empathy, compassion, and well-being. But at 80 percent expression? What then?
Even this brief survey of the past half century shows that ecstasis can easily be bent to darker ends. The selflessness that is the hallmark of a nonordinary state is only a hop, skip, and a jump from the brainwashing the Pentagon so desperately sought in the 1950’s. Timelessness, devoid of reference points, can feel a lot like paranoid schizophrenia and has been a linchpin of solitary confinement for centuries. The euphoric neurochemistry of effortlessness, as John Lilly realized, can create dependency on whoever can administer that next hit of bliss. Information richness can be mined as a truth serum, as the MK-ULTRA docs attempted, or amped up to overwhelm the unwilling, as the military guards orchestrated in Iraq.
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