When the prefrontal cortex shuts down, impulse control,5 long-term planning, and critical reasoning faculties go offline, too. We lose our checks and balances. Combine that with excessive dopamine telling us that the connections we’re making are radically important and must be immediately acted upon—that we’re radically important and must be listened to—and it’s not hard to imagine how this goes wrong.
So no matter what comes up, no matter how fantastical your experience, it helps to remember: It’s not about you. Take an encounter with selflessness for all the possibility it suggests, but fold those lessons back into your everyday roles and responsibilities. As Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield6 reminds us, “after the ecstasy, the laundry.”
Timelessness: It’s Not About Now
In 1806, General Zebulon Pike set out to survey7 the Rocky Mountains. When he crossed into Colorado and first sighted the fourteen-thousand-foot peak that would later bear his name, he wrote in his journal that he expected to camp on its summit in two days, three days at most. Three weeks later, Pike and a small band of his men gave up climbing in defeat. Pike, himself, failed to climb Pike’s Peak. And for an understandable reason: utterly unaccustomed to the thin air and high elevation, he’d badly misjudged the distance and the scale of the terrain he was exploring.
A similar issue arises when we encounter the timelessness of nonordinary states. Our ability to accurately estimate how close things are to happening,8 both in our life and in the world at large, can get seriously skewed. Under normal conditions, with an active prefrontal cortex constantly scanning scenarios in the past and the future, we spend very little time living completely in the present. So when a nonordinary state plunges us into the immediacy of the deep now, it brings an added sense of gravitas to the moment.
Popular religious movements, from the Seventh-Day Adventists9 in the 1840’s to Mayan calendar adherents in 2012, have all bet (and lost), on putting a doomsday pin in the calendar. Contemporary psychonauts have even coined a term10 for this persistent distortion: eschatothesia—the perception of the Eschaton, or the end of the world. “It is not necessarily the absolute ‘end of times,’” the Hyperspace Lexicon clarifies, “but can be a feeling of some huge event in the near future we are approaching, the end of an aeon, a marker in time after which nothing will be the same.”
And it’s not just would-be prophets who suffer from this distortion. Anyone who experiences the clarity and immediacy of ecstasis and tries to bring those insights back to reality has to account for the time lag. A surfer who in a flow state drops into a wave and strings together a series of moves he’s never pulled off before may need months of hard training to be able to reproduce them in a contest. An entrepreneur who glimpses a brilliant business model while dancing at a festival may need years to build the company that actually delivers on it. A musician who hears a fully formed symphony in her head during a meditation retreat could take the rest of her life to become skilled enough to actually play it.
Which is fine if we anticipate it, but demoralizing if we don’t. “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,”11 Bill Gates once said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten.” In bringing back ecstatic insights, it’s critical that we calibrate the difference between the reach-out-and-touch-it immediacy of the “deep now” with the frustratingly incremental unfolding of the day-to-day. As Zebulon Pike learned the hard way, at high elevations, objects in the mirror are sometimes much farther away than they appear. Remember: It’s not about Now.
Effortlessness: Don’t Be a Bliss Junkie
With effortlessness, we see a different downside: the combination of all those reward neurochemicals and overflowing inspiration can be intoxicating. Once people taste the fleeting effortlessness of ecstasis, some decide that’s how life is always supposed to be: a state of perpetual ease. They become bliss junkies, state chasers, refusing to do anything unless they can, to borrow a phrase, “go with the flow.”
Think of yourself as a colander—a bowl filled with holes. When you experience a peak state, it’s like turning on the kitchen faucet and flooding that colander with water. If there’s enough volume, the colander fills up despite the leaks. As long as water keeps flooding in, you will, for a moment, experience what it’s like to be a cup. You’ll feel whole; if you’re really inspired, holy.
Then the faucet turns off, the peak experience ends, and all that water leaks back out. In a matter of moments, you’ll settle back to where you started. The information recedes. The inspiration that was so easy to grasp moments ago slips away. And now you’ve got a decision to make. Do you engage the dull and repetitive work of plugging your leaks or do you go hunting for the next ecstatic faucet to tap?
The notion that hard work and persistence in the face of struggle might have a role in all of this often gets lost. In 2014, Ryan Holiday released a bestselling book12 on exactly this subject, The Obstacle Is the Way. It offered an update to the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius’s claim that “the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” And this is certainly true of the ecstatic way. All that “effortless effort” takes a lot of work.
So do the hard thing and the rest becomes much easier: Enjoy the state, but be sure to do the work. And no matter how tempting it is: Don’t become a Bliss Junkie.
Richness: Don’t Dive Too Deep
On November 17, 2013, Nick Mevoli bet on himself13 one last time, and lost. This was at Dean’s Blue Hole, a nearly seven hundred foot deep patch of ocean in the Bahamas. Mevoli was a rising star in the free-diving community, where divers swim as deep as they can with only a lungful of air. He had shot to prominence in the prior couple of years, winning contests, setting records and finding solace in his life under the water. “Water is acceptance of the unknown, of demons, of emotions, of letting go and allowing yourself to flow freely with it” he had written in his blog.14 “Come to the water willing to be consumed by it, but also have confidence that your ability will bring you back.” That day, after barely resurfacing from a seventy-two meter warm up dive into the Blue Hole, Mevoli went into cardiac arrest and died. This time, he wasn’t able to bring himself back.
When asked to comment on the accident, Natalia Molchanova, regarded by many as the greatest freehold breath diver in the world, said, “the biggest problem with freedivers . . . [is] now they go too deep too fast.”15 Less than two years later, off the coast of Spain, Molchanova took a quick recreational dive of her own. She deliberately ran though her usual set of breathing exercises, attached a light weight to her belt to help her descend, and swam downward, alone. It was supposed to be a head-clearing reset. But, Molchanova didn’t come back either.
And that’s the problem that free diving shares with many other state-shifting techniques: return too soon, and you’ll always wonder if you could have gone deeper. Go too far, and you might not make it back. “When we go down,” Molchanova had told an interviewer not long before her death, “we understand we are whole. We are one with the world.”16 That feeling is called “the rapture of the deep,” a euphoric high produced by alterations in the lungs’ gaseous chemistry, and it’s responsible for one in ten of all dive fatalities.
For those exploring nonordinary states, there’s a similar danger. You can stay down too long, amazed at what you’re discovering. You also can become enraptured by the deep. And if Mevoli and Molchanova are the cautionary tales of free diving, the poster child for ecstasis gone too far, is someone whose story we’ve come to know well—Dr. John Lilly. After abandoning his experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health, Lilly went deeper and deeper into his psychedelically fueled float tank research. By precisely balancing the effects of ketamine and sensory deprivation, he was able to blast off into the furthest reaches of inner space. So he could maintain contact with the Matrix-like reality he encountered there, Lilly started injecting himself with ketamine on an hourly basis, often for weeks at a time.
On one occasion the tank was to
o warm,17 but when he tried to get up and adjust the temperature, he fell back in and, immobilized by the ketamine, drowned. His wife, Toni, came into the lab to find her husband floating facedown and blue. She revived him using the CPR technique she had learned while reading the National Enquirer only two days earlier.
That wasn’t enough to slow Lilly—the rapture of the deep kept calling. While ketamine is so benign it’s routinely used as an anesthetic for children and pregnant women, it has an underground reputation as “the heroin of psychedelics.” As Lilly discovered, it’s the utterly novel information it provides, not its chemistry, that’s so addicting.
Not long after that near-fatal drowning, he had another brush with death. In the hospital, Lilly had a textbook NDE and, as he reported afterward, was visited by the same entities he’d been encountering in the float tank. They presented him with a choice: leave with them for good, or return to his body, heal, and focus on more worldly pursuits. Finally, Lilly got the message. He abandoned his psychedelic research and retired with his wife to Hawaii, where he lived to the ripe age of eighty-four.
There may not be another researcher who has dived as deeply into the mysteries of consciousness as John Lilly. He may just have been lucky, or, as he believed, had some help from other realms. But undoubtedly his rigorous training as a scientist, his insistence on preserving a critical and objective stance in the face of even the most outrageous experiences, saved his mind, and possibly his life.
After all this, Lilly came to one overarching conclusion: “What one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.”
If he was right, and there really are no limits to consciousness, then the point is not to keep going until we find it all, but to come back before we’ve lost it all. Because it really doesn’t matter what we find down there, out there, or up there, if we’re unable to bring it back to solid ground. So take it all in, but hold it loosely. And most critically, Don’t Dive Too Deep.
This leaves us with four rules of thumb to carry into our exploration of these states. It’s not about you and it’s not about now help us balance ego inflation and time distortion. While don’t become a bliss junky and don’t dive too deep ensure that we don’t get seduced by the sensations and information that arise in altered states.
Are these the only “known issues?” Not even close. Check out any of the world’s contemplative traditions or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and you’ll find dozens more. But these four cautions tie directly to the four core qualities of altered states—STER. They’re nonnegotiable. If you put it in the ditch with one of these, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. “No sympathy for the devil,”18 Hunter S. Thompson once wrote. “Buy the ticket, take the ride . . . and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well . . . maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion.”
The Ecstasis Equation
In skiing, the North Face of the Aiguille-du-Midi, a twelve-thousand-foot peak in Chamonix, France, is one of the ultimate challenges. “If the North Face . . . isn’t extreme skiing, then nothing is,”19 Hans Ludwig wrote in Powder magazine. “Every one of its routes features thousands of feet of complex high-angle terrain with constant death exposure, mandatory rappels, and a snowpack that sticks tenuously to the hanging shield of glacial ice crowning the peak.” Despite centuries of ski mountaineering in the region, no one completed a descent until 1994. Then, in 2001, Kristen Ulmer decided to give it a try.
Known as one of the best multisport athletes in the world, Ulmer was an extraordinarily talented big mountain skier, ski mountaineer, rock climber, ice climber, and paraglider. With a level of dominance not often seen in any sport, she was named “Best Female Extreme Skier in the World”—twelve years in a row. Of course, she wanted to become one of the first women to ski the North Face.
Two nights before Ulmer’s descent, four feet of snow fell. The next morning she got a late start. As the sun climbed, the snow started to soften and slide. “We got pinned on a 70 degree face,20 standing on a one-inch band of ice, while seven-story avalanches poured over our backpacks—for three hours. When it was over, they sent a crew in by helicopter to retrieve our bodies. They were pretty shocked to find us alive. I was pretty shocked to be alive.”
This would have been a wake-up call for many, but Ulmer couldn’t live without the rush. “Whenever I felt that level of fear, that’s when I felt the most alive. I was totally in the zone. And I was addicted to that feeling, I couldn’t quit.”
So she didn’t. She went skiing the next day, and again almost died. “That was followed by three more near-death experiences,” she explains. “I had five in five months. It was pretty clear the universe was screaming at me to stop doing what I was doing—and, I thought, being as nice about it as possible. But being a pro athlete was my salvation, my identity and my career. I had put decades of work into it. Quitting just seemed ridiculous.”
Then, in the middle of her crisis, Ulmer went to Burning Man for the first time. “I was blown away. I got the exact same feeling I got from sports. I got it from the interactive art. I got it from the group flow. And that was it, I quit my career cold turkey and walked away from everything.” Or, as Ski Journal once explained: “In the 1990s, Kristen Ulmer blew up the freeski scene as the first true female extreme skier. . . . then, she disappeared.”
Ulmer had realized that ecstasis can be accessed through a host of different pursuits. And that realization, as she says, “saved my life.” Since making this discovery, she has designed and built some of Burning Man’s most famous art cars (including the one Tony Hsieh moved to his Downtown Project in Las Vegas). She also trained as a meditation and performance coach, and now leads Zen ski camps. She hasn’t had to risk her life for a thrill in years.
“I still measure the quality of my life by the number of times I get into the zone,” explains Ulmer. “If I spend two weeks at Burning Man and only get that experience a handful of times, then I feel cheated. It wasn’t worth it. But now I can try different things. That’s the real change. Now I know I have options, that there are actual comparisons to make.”
Knowing there are options matters to plenty of people besides Ulmer. SEALs speak quietly of this same dilemma, of how hard it is to flip the switch when they come off deployment. We hear similar accounts in action sports meccas like Squaw Valley and Jackson Hole. Consistently we’re approached by athletes and their loved ones looking for ways to take fewer risks. Yet, like Ulmer in Chamonix, they haven’t figured out any other way to feel quite as alive.
Invariably, in those same conversations, someone always asks, “but what’s the best way to get into the zone?” To which we respond: it depends. It depends on your tolerance for risk, and how far over the edge you’re willing to hang. It depends on your sense of urgency, and whether your goals can be reached in minutes or decades. And it depends on how reliably your preferred approach delivers actionable information and insight.
Those three parameters—risk, reward, and time—provide a way to compare nonordinary states. This sliding scale lets you assess otherwise-unrelated methods—from meditation to psychedelics to action sports, to any others you can think of. And you can distill these variables into an equation:
Value = Time × Reward/Risk
In this equation, Time refers to the learning curve, or how long you need to invest in a particular technique until it can reliably produce the experience of STER. Reward refers to how well we retain the insights that arise and how consistently they drive positive change. Risk refers to the potential dangers. If there’s a chance that you could lose your life or your mind, that’s something to consider well in advance. Put them all together and you get an approximate Value for each pursuit.
This calculus is reflected in the different treatments for PTSD we examined in the chapter on psycholo
gy. A one-day session with MDMA produces a marked decrease or abatement in symptoms, but you have to be willing to ingest an amphetamine to experience it. Five weeks of surfing—potentially less risky than a drug intervention—achieves a similar result, but entails learning a new sport in an unfamiliar and sometimes dangerous environment. Meanwhile, meditation—both simpler and safer than surfing—requires twelve weeks and offers a slightly lessened benefit. These three approaches produce a similar reward (relief from trauma), but they come with varying degrees of risk and investment of time.
How you rank each variable is highly subjective—dependent on your abilities, responsibilities, and ambitions. But the final analysis is simple: are any of these pursuits worth the time, effort, and money we invest in them? Are we more energetic, empathetic, and ethical afterward? If not, they’re just distractions or diversions from our lives. “I care not a whit for a man’s religion,” Abraham Lincoln once quipped, “unless his dog is the better for it.”
And that goes double for techniques of ecstasy.
Hedonic Calendaring
In 1991, ARISE, the Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment, an organization that included representatives from the largest food and tobacco companies in the world, gathered in Venice, Italy. The meeting was dedicated to resisting “Calvinistic attacks21 on people who are obtaining pleasure without harming others.” The topic of discussion: the Bliss Point.
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