This book is high on adrenaline. Right after Steven Kotler published the phenomenal book “The Rise of Superman” about individual flow state, he encountered so many people that came forward to tell their stories about biohacking for performance.
“But what caught our attention were the conversations we were having after those presentations”, Kotler remarks. “On too many occasions to count, people would pull us aside to tell us about their clandestine experiments with “ecstatic technologies.””
Ah yes, ecstatic (or ecstasis). As Plato describes it, it is “an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.” In other words, group flow.
Kotler then continues, “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.”
What on Earth is going on here?
It took Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal 4 years to undergo the research for this ecstasis phenomenon. A journey that “has led us all over the world: 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.”
Their findings are then broken down into 4 categories in this book:
- Psychology: How the mind works.
- Neurobiology: How the hacks to reach ecstasis work in the brain.
- Pharmacology: The controlled usage of substances (such as psychedelics) to enter this state.
- Technology: The tools they use to induce or measure the altered states. Tools such as VR, wearables, and neurofeedback.
Indeed, the findings are exceptional. But what makes this book an even more incredible read is the stories that illustrate the points in action, from the story of the SEAL’s intense ambush operation in Afghanistan, to the appeal of a CrossFit “bland” gym with less distractions but more intensity, and of course to the high point of this book: the tales from the Burning Man festival, among many others. They show that by entering the ecstatic state we can increase productivity, heightened creativity, have deeper insight, can learn faster, and can even have a spiritual growth.
I mean, I felt that, in a much lesser degree. I often find it in the energy of music concerts or festivals, when watching a football match directly in the stadium, or on the low-key side of the spectrum when participating in a mass prayer or engagingly witnessing a cultural ritual.
Now, imagine what we can do if we are able to hack that group energy and synchronicity into a deliberate action? Like the myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and give humanity the ability to advance their civilization and improve their lives, we might just found the secret fire to an advanced life through the state of ecstasis. This is what the book is all about.
THE CHAOS THEORY 