Stealing Fire summary

In 2004, the US Navy’s SEAL Team Six was in Afghanistan on top secret business. Their mission? To capture an Al-Qaeda operative known as Al-Wazu.

Al-Wazu had broken out of an American detention center and was recruiting new members for Osama Bin Laden. The SEALs needed Al-Wazu alive; he’d be a valuable intelligence source. They had to act fast, carefully, and silently – all as a team. They found Al-Wazu in his compound, armed but asleep. He was captured without anyone firing a single shot.

The Navy SEALs are just one example of a group that uses what we currently know about non-ordinary states to explore their practical potential.

To make sense of the various efforts in ecstasis research, the authors have identified four main forces of ecstasis: psychology, neurobiology, pharmacology, and technology. We’ll look at each of these areas in the next few blinks. Let’s start with psychology.

The more we learn about the human body, the more complex the relationship between mind and body appears.

We now know that emotions don’t just originate in the brain. They’re also influenced by the heart, which has 40,000 neurons, and the stomach and intestines, which contain 100 million neurons.

When wildlife photographer John Downer planted cameras underwater to document the behavior of bottlenose dolphins in the wild, he was surprised to see them so relaxed. Then he took a closer look at the footage.

The dolphins appeared to be playing some kind of game – each would chew on a pufferfish before passing it to one of their dolphin friends. Desperate, the pufferfish played its last UNO card and released a cloud of lethal nerve toxin. Too much of this toxin is deadly, but just a little happens to make dolphins pleasantly stoned.

Alan Metni started out his career as a lawyer, but he soon found that he much preferred jumping out of airplanes; his dream was to fly. Metni completed thousands of jumps and was so hooked on the thrill of flying that he started looking for other ways to train even more. For him, flight was an instant ticket to ecstasis. The thrill of the jump didn’t compare to any other experience. 

However, jumping out of a plane can be dangerous. There are frequent fatal accidents each year, and they happen to some of the most experienced flyers. Not everyone is prepared to take those risks. 

For one week every year, a pilgrimage of ecstasis innovators takes place in the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada. It’s frequented by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, from Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin to Tesla’s Elon Musk. Artists, musicians, and performers exhibit their consciousness-altering creations. And inventors like Mikey Siegel showcase their prototypes.

This event is Burning Man. It’s a massive exercise in constructing a city from nothing – as one enormous group.

Many of the people we’ve discussed so far are at the forefront of disruptive innovation; they’re pioneering new ways to harness the four forces of ecstasis. But let’s step back and take a look at which tools have begun to be adopted more broadly. 

In psychology, meditation has been rebranded as mindfulness-based stress reduction, and it’s turned into a billion-dollar industry.