Mapping Cloud 9: Part 1 - Steven Kotler | Flow Research Collective Radio

Until the 1950s, and we'll come back to this story later, everybody thought flow was a mystical experience. In fact, they thought it was an experience only spiritual and religious people got to have. So when I say that the science of spirituality and the science of high performance started out together, this is what I mean. We now define flow as a state of ultimate human performance, right? It's different from a spiritual peak state in how we think about it. But 100 years ago, it wasn't. We thought they were the same thing, and we'll talk about what's different, what's the same. We'll go into all of this. But when we talk about the science of spirituality and the science of high performance on a dark and stormy night, this is what I mean. It was all mashed together and we just didn't know.

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This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an entrepreneur for 23 years. It never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline. Like, it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, "what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock." And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, "Oh God, that's really meaningful to me." 'Cause some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball. Or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Rhian Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio. And welcome to today's episode, which is from Steven Kotler's book, Mapping Cloud Nine. Now, Mapping Cloud Nine, of all of Steven's books, has, for me personally, the coolest subtitle. And the subtitle really is going to describe the essence of what this episode is focused on. The subtitle is Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience. And that's what Stephen in this book today is going to be talking about. It's a chapter from Mapping Cloud 9. You're going to hear Stephen's voice going deep on the topic Stephen knows best and is most passionate about. So, with that, enjoy today's episode. It's a fantastic one and a real treat to get a sample of Mapping Cloud 9, one of Stephen's books, which came out a couple of years ago. So, enjoy. And until next time, all the best.

Hello. Welcome to Mapping Cloud Nine: Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience. I'm Steven Kotler. I'm going to be your host for the next few hours talking this through. And in my mind, when I think about what this is about, I often think about it as the science of spirituality meets the science of high performance on a dark and stormy night. And what I mean by that is we are gonna back up both the science of spirituality and the science of high performance to kind of their modern origin, which is right after the 1870s. And we're gonna peel back the hood on what I think is one of the greatest kind of scientific adventure stories of all time. And the tale spans a couple hundred years where the upper possibility space of human experience, and when I use that phrase, that phrase denotes a whole range of experiences, starting with states of awe, flow states, meditative states, trance states, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, speaking in tongues, and so forth. And of course, contemplative feelings and compassion, ecstasy, those kinds of emotions. This is all the upper possibility space of human experience. And over the past 150 years, science mapped it for the very, very first time. And it was actually twin sciences that mapped it. One branch came out of the science of high performance. The other branch came out of the science of spirituality. And we're going to see how these two ideas started out together, broke apart, and have come back together. Along the way is we're going to see almost everything we thought about human performance, about human possibility, and about religion, mysticism, and spirituality overturned. All of our ideas, what we thought was going on under the hood of all these things, was overturned over the past 150 years. This has massive ramifications from everything from the study of consciousness to the meaning of life. And along the way, we're going to probe and come to the intersection of peak performance and spirituality. What I'm going to try to do is separate fact from fiction, right? We're going to start the birth of fields like psychology and neuroscience back in the 1870s, '80s, and '90s. And we're going to walk up to where we are today. And along the way, we're going to decode some very peculiar, very interesting, and very powerful so-called mystical phenomenon. And along the way, I am probably going to sound incredibly reductive. Reductive is a term scientists use, and it means reducing things down to their simplest parts. And it was an idea that really sort of caught fire post-Darwin when psychologists, philosophers, early neuroscientists really wanted to kind of reduce everything to biological instincts and build up from there. I want to say that I think this is a very important way of looking at phenomenon, but just because I'm reducing something to its bare essence, I'm only talking about one scale of reality, right? So I will be talking about things that are going on in the brain and the body. There are scales above this. We can go off into the astrological scales, much bigger phenomenon going on. There are scales way below this, down into the quantum fields, into the information fields. I'm not going to try to reduce things into those other areas. I am just talking about this particular branch of reality, which is to say I'm not giving you the full picture. I am giving you what we know, what we can point at and say this is true. And what we really mean by that is this is true right now based on everything we know up to here. And I'm not going to try to extrapolate into those other domains where we don't have as much understanding. So I'm being reductive, but I am not saying there isn't more mystery out there. There is more mystery out there, but I'm just trying to keep the mystery in the mystery. The point I think we're going to make along the way is that a spiritual path is not unlike a high-performance path. In fact, I'm going to argue that even though the language is the same, they are complementary, overlapping paths. And from a neurobiological perspective, they're actually the exact same path. So learning about high performance can aid you on a spiritual quest, and learning about spirituality can aid you on a high performance quest. So that's sort of a big picture look at what we're going to be doing. So welcome to Mapping Cloud 9. And along the way, just want to give you a little taste of what's in it for you guys, right? Why do you want to just go with me on this ride unless the subject is really keenly interesting to you? One, you're gonna come out the other side with a really good sense of the language that scientists use to talk about experiences that you've probably had, that you're probably curious about, that you probably want to learn more about. And a lot of the knowledge of a field is often tucked inside of its technical language. So by breaking down some of the language and just giving you a little bit of familiarity, you're going to have a better vocabulary for understanding what you're experiencing in your own life. We're also gonna walk through the history, right? What we're doing over the next 8 hours is Nietzsche to now. We're going to start in 1870 with sort of the birth of Nietzsche, who I think of as the first high-performance philosopher. We'll talk about why. And we're going to go to now. And the reason this is so great, this kind of historical overview of the modern era, is your brain loves narrative. It is a machine built to do pattern recognition, to hunt cause and effect. So we're built to understand story. So if I can walk you through this big overarching 100 third-year modern history of science and consciousness and the science of spirituality, et cetera, et cetera. It's like having a giant Christmas tree and all the facts that come along are the little ornaments, but I'm giving you the big Christmas tree. If you can understand the language of a subject and its history, that is usually enough to start thinking inside that subject, right? And so this new framework for thinking about spirituality and high performance is going to unlock a lot of possibility in your life. And we're going to talk a lot about sort of hacking consciousness and hacking flow. And by the way, when I use the term hacking, first of all, I'm not using it in a negative connotation. Second of all, I do not mean a shortcut. A lot of people use hacking to talk about a shortcut. In both the path of high performance and the path of spirituality, as far as I can tell, there are no shortcuts. There are paths where you'll waste a lot of time because you're not in alignment with your biology. And your neurobiology. When I'm talking about hacking, what I'm often saying is, hey, if we can understand mechanism, we can understand how the body and the brain produce this particular experience, we can get more of it or less of it. We have some abilities, some power that we didn't have beforehand. So I'm going to be talking a lot about hacking consciousness and hacking performance and even hacking spirituality. I am not saying there's a shortcut here. What I am saying is if you can understand mechanism, you can go A to B faster. Right? And hopefully, on the back end of this, you're gonna get a sense of where the mysteries still lie, where are there more questions, and places where you really can make a contribution. And that's gonna be important, and I'll talk about why in a little bit. But first, I sort of wanted to jump in. This story and the story we're gonna be telling, for me personally, it started a lot of different places. One of the places it started was in the early 1990s. And I became a journalist back in the early 1990s. And back then, action sports— surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, the like— they were really hot topics. So this meant if you were a writer or journalist and you could ride and ski, or ride and climb, or ride and surf, there was work. I couldn't do any of those things really well, but I was desperate in need of the work. And so I lied to my editors, and I was lucky enough to spend the better part portion of about 10 years chasing professional athletes, mostly professional extreme athletes, what we called extreme and what we now call action adventure sport athletes, around mountains and across oceans. And I will tell you that if you are not a professional athlete and you spend all your time chasing professional athletes around mountains and across oceans, you are going to break things. I broke a lot of things. By the time it was all said and done, it was something around 80 bones. That was the total. When you break that many bones, you end up taking a lot of time off. So what would happen, I'd be hanging out, snap this or that, and I'd have to take 3 or 4 or 5 months off. And when I would come back, the progress I saw was mind-boggling. It didn't make any sense. Stuff that had been considered absolutely impossible, never been done, never going to be done just 4 or 5 months ago wasn't just being done. It was being iterated upon. And I want to give you 3 examples of what I saw happening, because what I was actually witnessing was nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance. Ultimate human performance is technically defined as performance when life or limb is on the line. And from an evolutionary perspective, it should be the slowest growth category, right? It should not explode at any one particular point in time. And yet this was happening. And let me give you a couple of examples. Easy one is snowboarding. So in 1996, the biggest gap jump anybody had ever cleared on a snowboard was the Baker Road Gap in Mount Washington. And the Baker Road Gap is big. It's built over a highway, and it's 40 feet. So snowboarders were essentially jumping two buses stacked back to back in 1996. And that was huge and really, really big. And people thought you could edge it up, maybe go 60 feet or 80 feet. It was then believed that above 80 feet, no human being could land. Couldn't do it on skis, couldn't do it on a snowboard, just wasn't possible. Is it actually possible? Well, here we are, less than two decades later, and snowboarders can now clear almost 300 feet worth of a gap jump. So we have gone in less than two decades from jumping two buses to jumping a skyscraper. Surfing is another example. This is a 1,000-year-old sport, and from 400 AD until 1992, progress had been really slow. 25 feet was the biggest wave anybody had ever surfed. There are actually physics papers written about how you cannot paddle into a wave over 25 feet. And it's really simple. The waves just move too fast to paddle into. Well, today surfers are routinely paddling into waves that are 60, 80, 100 feet big. All right. This is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance. I'm going to tell you my favorite story of this because it's still amazing to me. So in 2012, a rock climber named Alex Honnold free soloed Half Dome. Now, Half Dome is in Yosemite in California, and it is a huge wall. It takes most climbers a day and a half, and they climb in pairs and they bring ropes and they bring equipment and they bring gear and they bring porta ledges and they sleep on the side of the wall. And it's a big production. 2012, Alex Honnold free soloed Half Dome. Free solo means he climbed without rope. He climbed out without protection. If he fell, he died. That simple. He climbed Half Dome in an hour and 22 minutes. It is the rough equivalent of running a 4-minute mile in 43 seconds, right? So back then when I was watching all this happen, it was weirder than it sounds, even though it sounds really strange, because these were my friends. These weren't strangers I was reading about in magazines or watching on television. These were guys I was drinking with. You know, you'd go out in the evening, you'd have a couple beers, with Shane and you go out the next morning and Shane would do something nobody in the history of the world had ever done before and didn't look possible. And that really spun my head around. I want to know what the hell was going on. But more importantly, and this isn't the case now, but back in the early 1990s, action adventure sport athletes were a really rowdy, irreverent punk rock group of people with very few natural advantages. So most of the people I knew came from really broken homes, had horrific, horrific childhoods. Many of them single-parent homes, sometimes no parents, very, very, very little education as well, and almost no money. And yet here these people were reinventing what was possible for our species on a semi-regular basis. And I wanted to know what the hell was going on. But I had also broken 82 bones, and I knew if I didn't take my question out of action sports, I was going to die. I was going to kill myself along the way. So that's essentially what I did. And I have written essentially 10 books about what I discovered along the way. And I've looked at this question of what does it take to do the impossible? So high performance, the peak of high performance, we're talking about the science of high performance. That's one of the lineages. This was my introduction to that science. And I looked at it first in action sports very deeply. But then, for example, my book Tomorrowland is an investigation, especially I spent roughly 20 years investigating those maverick scientists who took science fiction ideas and turned them into science fact technology. So whether this was the invention of the flying car or the very first bionic eye, the artificial vision system that was ever turned on, or the very first private space launch, or on and on. In my book Bold, I looked at really maverick businessmen, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, people who have built world-changing companies Often in areas where people didn't even think you could start a company. Right. When Richard Branson started Virgin Airlines, everybody said it was a horrific idea, that there was no room in the airlines for his ideas. On and on and on and on. So impossible business feats in abundance, where I teamed up with my friend Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize and the co-founder of Singularity University in Silicon Valley, where they study the application of exponentially accelerating technology to solving World's Grand Challenges. And we wrote a book called Abundance about individuals and small teams of people going after impossible global challenges— poverty, healthcare, energy scarcity, those sorts of questions, water shortages— and individuals succeeding where 20 years ago, large corporations and big governments were the only people going after these problems were actually failing. And everywhere I went, I asked the question of how is this possible? What are we seeing? And one of the answers, and it's going to be an answer that we're going to spend a lot of time on. So I want to start here to just give you a definition and a look at what we're talking about. Whenever you see the impossible become possible, you see a state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. And I want to define flow for you, and this is not my definition. This is a technical scientific definition. It was originally coined by a man named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We're going to talk more about him later, but it is defined as an optimal state of consciousness. It is a state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, we've all had this experience. It refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand, everything else just disappears, right? Our concentration gets so intense in the right here, right now that action and awareness will start to merge. Time will pass strangely. The technical term for this is time dilation. What that means is sometimes occasionally it'll slow down, you get that freeze frame effect. Anybody who's been in a car crash or seen The Matrix, right? What they now call bullet time. More frequently, much more commonly, time speeds up and 5 hours go by in like 5 minutes. And this is the experience we've all had when you sit down to write that quickie email and you look up an hour later and you realize you've written a long essay. That's a light-grade microflow state, but that's just a taste of sort of time dilation. Sense of self disappears as well. And our inner critic, that nagging, always-on defeatist voice in our head goes very, very silent in flow. Now, when we talk about flow, and I will be talking about it extensively later on, this is exactly what I'm talking about. And underneath everything I'm describing, there is a very precise physiological and neurobiological signature. So physiological, there's what's going on in the body. So what's your heart doing? What's your skin doing? Those kinds of responses, right? Galvanic skin response, which is basically sweating. It's a fear response. That's a physiological signal. Neurobiological signals, EEG, fMRI, so anything that measures brainwaves or brain activity, those are the things that I'm talking about here. And so a lot of what we're gonna do over the next 6 to 8 hours, right, when we walk through this voyage of discovery where people literally sort of mapped human consciousness for the very first time scientifically, obviously in Eastern traditions, they have been mapping human consciousness from a different perspective, for thousands of years, and there are obviously Western magical traditions, mystical traditions where the same thing has been going on. But scientifically, it's the past 150 years. And flow was a huge key, and you'll understand why as we go along. But the most important thing to know is while flow is a state of consciousness that is really, really well-defined physiologically, neurobiologically, psychologically— in fact, psychologically, this is the core definition that is used when we define flow. So when psychologists and scientists talk about flow, they're talking about the neurobiological signature and the psychological signature. But the state has core psychological characteristics, and I listed a bunch of these for you a second ago. Uninterrupted concentration in the present moment, the vanishing of self, time passing strangely, loss of bodily awareness is another one, an increased sense of control that I have more impact over events, and so forth. There were 10 of Originally, this shrunk down to 7 now, and there are 5 or 6 extremely well-established psychometric instruments that measure these characteristics. So when I talk about flow, I'm talking about something that's very specifically psychological, neurobiological, and physiological. But, but until the 1950s, and we'll come back to this story later, everybody thought flow was a mystical experience. In fact, they thought it was an experience only spiritual and religious people got to have. So So when I say that the science of spirituality and the science of high performance started out together, this is what I mean. We now define flow as a state of ultimate human performance, right? It's different from a spiritual peak state in how we think about it. But 100 years ago, it wasn't. We thought they were the same thing. And we'll talk about what's different, what's the same. We'll go into all of this. But when we talk about the science of spirituality and the science of high performance on a dark and stormy night, this is what I mean. It was all mashed together, and we just didn't know. And finally, before we sort of jump into the sort of the core text of the heart of Mapping Cloud Nine, I want to talk a little bit about why I wrote this book and where it came from. I have a little bit of an agenda, and I like to be transparent about my agenda. And the first thing I want you to know is that As a writer, I'm trained as a New Journalist, and this is a very specific approach to the truth. New Journalism emerged in the late '50s and 1960s. It's writers like Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee. And the idea here is really simple, but it's kind of important to our project, which is that coming out of the '50s, it was really clear to a lot of, like, newspaper writers and magazine writers that in the editing process, truth was getting fucked with. We were messing with the truth. This wasn't like Noam Chomsky and his big conspiracy theories. This was, "Hey, I'm the writer. I choose fact A and B over C and D. And my editor comes along and he likes A more than B, so he asks me to develop A, and things get cut out." And then there's a top editor on top of that, and then there's an editor-in-chief, and a publisher, and so forth. And what happens is the truth gets distorted. So, new journalists fought back by putting so much of themselves themselves in the story, you always knew where they were coming from. So you always knew what their biases were. So you always knew why they were selecting the facts they were selecting. That was the whole point. So I am a new journalist, which means I'm going to tell you a little bit about me and where I'm coming from in a second. The other thing I want to tell you is I want to talk a little bit about what I call a truth filter. So a truth filter is how do I know something I'm telling you is true? So as a reporter, the standard truth filter is if I've got a And I can get 3 experts to support my fact. Good deal. I can publish it. Excellent. True story. And we're going to hear about this research a little bit later. Years ago, I was writing a story on the neuroscience of out-of-body and near-death experiences, and I was stunned by how much science had actually discovered about these experiences. And we're going to walk through that later and you'll get to share this excitement. But at the time, I was like, how the hell is this not common knowledge? Why doesn't everybody know this? How do they know this? And so I started asking the scientists I was interviewing, and the guy I was talking to said, oh, the problem was these two people, Person X and Person Y, wrote these really popular books on it, and they're not really scientific, and they sort of ruined it for the rest of us. And I went, oh, okay, that's great. And I fact-checked this particular fact with three other experts, and they gave me the exact same name for X and the exact same name for Y. So I had initial fact, and I had three confirmations, and fantastic, and we published it. And it turns out every single person who gave me this fact got the name of one of the book authors wrong. And instead of giving me the name of the correct book author who had wrote a very popular book on the pseudoscience of out-of-body experience, they gave me Charles Tart's name. Charles Tart is one of the most vaunted, lauded altered state scientific researchers ever. And they got everything wrong. Literally everything they told me they got wrong. And the magazine got a very angry phone call from Mr. Tart. And I I was very, very apologetic, and from that moment on, I realized that was not good enough. So every fact in here has been checked with a minimum of 5 people. And I'll tell you something interesting, by the way, if you ever want to play this game. I have found that if you ask 5 people if a particular fact is true, 4 will usually say yes, and the 5th person will actually tend to tell you something that contradicts what the previous 4 have told you, and then you have to start over and talk to 5 more. But that's my truth filter. So, everything we're gonna be talking about today, so you know how accurate I want it to be, that's how I'm applying it. I also want you, as a new journalist, to know a little bit about where I'm coming from, who I am. I'm good at my job because I'm a very frustrated seeker. When I was 19 years old, I dropped out of college, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, 'cause the New Age was booming. Coming, and over the next X amount of years there was shamans and crystals and ashrams and monasteries and astrology and tarot and psychedelics and more psychedelics. And by the time it was all said and done, I could sit in the full lotus for 6 to 8 hours at a time, I could chant in Sanskrit for 4 or 5 hours at a time, and I never once had a mystical experience of any kind. Nothing interesting ever ever happened to me. And I was such a frustrated seeker that I spun it around and I went into the science of spiritual experience and mystical experience and flow states, trying to find answers to the questions that I could not find on a spiritual path. So I tend to be a little dismissive of some of the spiritual ideas, and you're going to hear nothing over the next 6 to 8 hours that is going to confirm your belief in sky that's not where I'm coming from. But now at least you know why I feel the way I feel, right? And I will also say that even though I am a hardcore science guy, I'm a hardcore science guy who's had a 20-year Ashtanga yoga practice and a 25-year meditation practice. And most of that is breath or mantra meditation. Though I will say, a friend of mine who's the Tibetan Lama told me that when he first got to Tibet, they locked him in a cave and said, "For the next 7 months, I want you to contemplate what it's like to have 11 heads." and 1,000 hands. 11 heads so you can see from multiple perspectives and 1,000 hands so you can help as many people as possible. So I will tell you that I have been trying this particular meditation for the past 8 months, and I can get the head or the hands. I can't get them both at once. So I have a little bit of what you would call a spiritual practice. But as I said, I am not a guy who believes in sky dad at all, but I am a guy who believes that the path to peak performance is a spiritual path. And I'm also somebody who cringes when they say a word like spiritual path. So I'm gonna spend the next hours sort of proving to you, or at least to myself, that I can use that word out loud and mean something by it. And finally, I wanna talk a little bit about my agenda, why I'm doing all this. And the reason I'm doing all this, even though I think that in the spiritual community there is very, very sloppy language and very, very sloppy be thinking way, way, way too much. I also know that the field that I am most passionate about, which is studying the science of spirituality and studying the science of human performance— the greatest leaps forward over the past 50 years, maybe the past 150 years, have been when scientists got together with people from the spiritual traditions and we bridged that gap. So a lot of what I'm trying to do is say, hey, there are really big questions out there. There are people with deep spiritual practices who have all kinds of knowledge bases that the scientists are never going to have access to. But if you can't learn a little bit of the language of science, we're never going to listen to what you have to say. So I'm trying to bridge the gap a little bit. I'm extending a knowledge branch from the science side across the bow, and maybe somebody on the other side will pick it up and advance us a little bit farther. For us. And what we're going to do to do all that in Math in Cloud 9 is we're going to focus on 5 different transformational epochs. We're going to sort of start with what I think of as the actualization of self-actualization, or this is sort of the era that goes from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Jung, where a lot of the foundational ideas about the science and the science of spirituality and the science of high performance were laid down for the first time. Then we're going to jump in. The second era is what I call the mystical split. It starts with Abraham Maslow, and this is where science and spirituality actually split apart. And we're going to track the science of high performance sort of from Maslow to now. Then we're going to rewind the clock going all the way back, and we're going to follow the same trajectory with the science of spirituality. Then we're going to do this a third time with what we can consider sort of a psychedelic detour. Psychedelics are its own funky category. In the beginning, you go back 150 years and this was spirituality and high performance rolled into one. And then it sort of got split apart. And now today, sort of coming back together. And finally, The last big sort of chapter of this is going to be the Mapping Cloud Nine section where we talk about the emerging picture of today's upper possibility space. And here we're going to do a lot of decoding and application. Things are going to get really practical. So we're going to apply some of the spiritual ideas to the science of high performance, and hopefully you'll come out the other side better performers. And we're going to apply the science of high performance to the spiritual pathway. And so hopefully you'll come out the other alongside with a richer spiritual practice. And the end goal is that you will have a much more interesting, intriguing, and meaningful life on the back end of this.

Hey there, just going to interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience standards to be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

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All right, so I want to jump in with Friedrich Nietzsche. So why are we starting this discussion with Friedrich Nietzsche? You probably are familiar with Nietzsche. You probably read Nietzsche back in high school or in college. Nietzsche's a really good point to jump in because even though philosophy has long sort of concerned with questions of high performance and even questions of spirituality. I'm thinking specifically of the Greeks. Stoic philosophy is a really good, early, great kind of high-performance philosophy that's made a big comeback as of lately. But Nietzsche is the first major post-Darwinian philosopher, and that really matters. So 1859, Darwin publishes The Origin of Species, and he brings the entire house of God God crumbling down, right? Suddenly man is no longer created in God's image. Suddenly man is the byproduct of a random evolutionary process, and we're related to apes, etc., etc. And as a result, Nietzsche is the first kind of post-Darwinian philosopher, and he's part of a growing group of people who went, oh wow, Well, look, biology evolved, our bodies evolved, I'll bet our brains evolved too. So Nietzsche said, and he says this in his autobiography, he says, who among the philosophers before me was in any way a psychologist? Before me there was simply no psychology. And what he means is, before me there was no Darwin. And without Darwin, we didn't know the mind evolved. And because we didn't know the mind evolved, in a certain way. We couldn't get a good psychological picture of who we were, who we are, right? And this is also why Nietzsche said God is dead, right? This is his famous quote. And what he means is he doesn't just mean God is dead, right? He means our big theory ideas about God, capital G— Christianity, Islam, organized religion. But he was also going right at any philosopher who had a perfect world. So Plato's world of forms, right? There's this perfect world of forms that exists out there. It's perfect. Nietzsche was saying, no, it's not. Shut up. Everything is chaotic. Everything evolves. There's no such thing. And he was really pointing at Enlightenment thinkers who thought that the mind of man, a.k.a. man and woman, was perfectible. And Nietzsche didn't think this was true at all. Like, he used to talk about Plato. He essentially said Plato was not a big fan of Christianity, as we know. And Nietzsche used to call Plato Christianity for highbrows. So he was really opposed to any of these perfect world systems. Nietzsche thought man was a mess, right? That we weren't evolving in a specific direction, that evolution was random and chance played a role, right? And the thing here that matters is before Nietzsche, before Darwin, meaning, purpose in life came from God. Now it has to come from human beings. And this is huge, huge for Nietzsche. Now, couple other things that Nietzsche thought that are really important, and these ideas are going to come back again and again and again in different forms over the course of our story. So one of Nietzsche is the first in a long line of thinkers who thought culture weighs too much, right? Freud is probably the most famous of these thinkers. Freud's big idea was, look, mommy weighs a ton, culture weighs a ton. It is really hard to get out from under this stuff. But Nietzsche felt the same way. And when we talk about the weight of culture, the weight of history and the weight of mommy, we're talking about at an unconscious level. Level, right, at a really deep unconscious level. And this is how it evolves, right? This is Freud's unconsciousness with all its complexes. This is Jung and his archetypes. This is Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, structural anthropologist, and his deep structures. Noam Chomsky's universal grammar. Jacques Derrida, the postmodern philosopher, his position on language, which plays such a role in today's social justice issues, right? And let me explain what I mean by this. So culture weighs too much and we can't get away from it. It's built in unconsciously. So Derrida argues about language, and this is one of the most mysterious, obfuscated arguments. What he's saying is actually really simple and precise. He's saying, look, language is synchronic and diachronic. Synchronic means positional word at a particular point in time within a current linguistic system it's occupying, meaning a cat is not a dog and it's not a horse, but it's also what we mean by the 21st century of a cat, right? So the definition includes a genus and a species, and it doesn't include, say, things that we used to think about cats 300 years ago that were superstitious, right? So that's the synchronic meaning, meaning there's cultural weight inside the language we use to describe reality. So we can't even get past culture when we're trying to describe reality, right? The other problem is diachronic, right, which is the historical catalog of all the meanings. So if I use the word justice today, right, it means one thing. If I use the word justice 1,000 years ago, it means something else, right? If we use the word justice, you know, in biblical times, it means I can stone my child at the city gates for badmouthing mommy and daddy, right? The words mean different things at different times. Culture is buried inside the language. So that was a long, long tangent to get us back to Nietzsche, who basically thought of culture as evolutionary success stories, right? What we think of as culture are just strategies that work. And his— one of his favorite quotes about this that I love, he said, the past of every form and way of life, of cultures that formerly lay right next to or on top of each other, now flow into us modern souls. Our drives now run back everywhere. We ourselves are a kind of chaos. Right? And what he means by we are a kind of chaos is we're an aggregation of intertwined psychological entities. Some of these are unconscious, they're the weight of culture, they're mommy, and some of it are our old ancient instincts, all sort of mashed together into the mess. Right? So he doesn't believe we we can know everything about our minds. This is really important. He believes in the unconscious, right? And that mommy and culture are heavy there. But the most important thing about Nietzsche is he thought there had to be more going on. He thought we weren't doomed to this, right? And so he wanted to replace the struggle to survival with one of his most misinterpreted terms, the will to The will to power has nothing to do with what we think of as power over another human being or power in a political sense. He is talking about unearthing our true nature and overcoming our true nature. The struggle for self-overcoming, the struggle for self-creation, for self-actualization, for excellence, right? What used to be God or these perfect world things is now man, human being, King's duty, right? So he doesn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He wrote a really great book called Twilight of the Idols where he said, look, I do philosophy with a hammer. And people thought what Nietzsche meant is I smash things. And he doesn't mean it that way. He means he's going to ring the idols like you would ring a bell, and he's going to see which ones are hollow and which ones have substance. By idols, he means any of the so-called great men— Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Plato, Aristotle, right? And what he wants us to do when we think about these people is not think of them as gods, but understand that these were all human beings. So when Jesus was coming up with his ideas, he is a man having brilliant creative insights, exercising his will to power, right? But you have to judge these insights through the lens of science. So when philosophers practice philosophy, because the topics are so big and highfalutin, you know, Nietzsche was interested in values and ontology and all these fancy words, they call them, to make it a little more humble, projects. So Nietzsche's project was essentially trying to decode all of these ancient traditions and see what holds up, what doesn't hold up, what makes sense through the lens of science, and what should we look at and say, oh, this This is just the culture of the time or the sociology of the time or the politics of the time, and we should strip it out, right? Like in the Jewish dietary laws, nobody looks at the laws of kosher and thinks anymore, this is the word of God. We think, oh wow, in the era before we really could cook, trichinosis was a problem and you shouldn't eat raw pork or you shouldn't eat shellfish, right? Like this is a health idea disguised as a religious idea. So Nietzsche wants to strip all that stuff out and get to the core ideas. The one thing I also want to say is that Nietzsche is sort of a high romantic, and what he means by this is he is— what we would now say about him today is he's spiritual but not religious. He believes, even though he doesn't believe in these perfect worlds, he does believe in this experience of cosmic unity, of becoming one with everything. That's sort of woven through. So there's a mystical current in Nietzsche underneath all this stuff. But as a general rule, Nietzsche had a really simple formula for high performance. And we're going to do this throughout. And this often gets lost. We hear all these really big kind of fancy philosopher names and we forget that what they're actually trying to do, a lot of them, is just to help us live better lives. Right. So there are actual— especially in Nietzsche, there's a high performance formula. Formula, and it's really sort of a 4-step formula. And the reason we're going to walk through it is both because I think it's really, really cool and really, really useful, but it's amazing that where we end up 150 years from now, these ideas are still— not only are they incredibly relevant, now they're scientifically validated. That's what's really interesting. And it also means that long before there was any science to back Nietzsche up, right, long before we had modern neuroscience, modern psychology, modern anything, this dude was right. And it's worth pointing that out. So at the core of what he said is, and this is sort of his recipe for becoming the Übermensch, right? Übermensch was his word for the Superman, right? The overman. And he didn't think really any one person could do this. He thought this was our project as a species to try to evolve into this. And what he said is the place you got to start is you got to find your passion and your purpose. Find an organizing idea. This is what Rilke meant by live the questions. Rilke was very influenced by Nietzsche, same era, roughly. Live the questions. Find a central organizing idea and then attack it creatively. Nietzsche saw art as fundamental to high performance and as an antidote to nihilism, to world weariness. And this was— he was really concerned about this. Nietzsche pointed out, he said, look, look, if God is dead and there's no meaning coming from up above and we got to make it for ourselves, this is really hard. This is really hard. And if we don't make it for ourselves, we are going to fall prey to fascists who serve as the new deities. In other words, Nietzsche saw Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini coming 40 years before they showed up. He was dead on right about everything that was about to come. Out of this, right, comes the will to power, which is the great existentialist mandate, right? We take full responsibility for our choices and we act, we create, and we alone bear the responsibility for our creation. Now, art wasn't just the antidote. Creativity, self-expression, questions, self-actualization, self-discovery, wasn't just the antidote to nihilism. He loved it so much because art reminds us of what he called states of animal vigor. And he used a very specific term. He used the term Rausch. Now, Rausch is essentially the ancient German term for flow. It originally comes from Goethe, and it means the acceleration of movement leading to a flowing joy. Now this is interesting because what Goethe and Nietzsche are talking about is a subdued, controllable ecstasy and elation. So this isn't like a possession experience, right, where you are overtaken by spirit and you lose control of yourself in rausch, in flow. This is peak performance. You are at your best. But they also talk about it as there's a— the separation of high and low is erased. This the we are becoming one with everything, right? They also talked about rausch as the delight of the inner faculties that lead to self-forgetfulness, right? So this is Csikszentmihalyi's The Vanishing of Self as a fundamental definition to flow, just 100 years literally before Csikszentmihalyi came up with the idea. This is also really cool. Nietzsche was the first, by no means the last, to figure out that flow flow was ethically neutral, right? There is the rausch of creativity, and then there's the rausch of destruction. Nietzsche also pointed out, by the way, that flow or rausch could be accessed chemically under the influence of certain narcotics, and he talked about it as a strength, a vigor. For there to be art, for there to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological precondition is indispensable. Possible. Rausch. Rausch must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine, else there is no art, as Nietzsche said. Now that's his third point. His fourth point— and this is very Nietzsche, but we're going to see it again and again and again and again— and this is a high-performance tradition that is necessary in the spiritual community and often gets very overlooked in the spiritual community. So one of the things you're you're gonna see as we go along is oftentimes, because these are similar paths, if you're on a high-performance path and you're stuck, you need a spiritual answer. And if you're on a spiritual path and you're stuck, oftentimes you need a high-performance answer, right? And one example is here. And for Nietzsche, he felt that suffering is not optional. He felt that the only way out is through, right? He felt that the measure of a really good life was a life spent suffering. He used to write Christmas cards to his friends that would say things like, "Congratulations, I hear you got gout this year and cancer and lost an eye and had your leg amputated. How fantastic for you, because of everything that you could learn on the other side of that." One of his favorite descriptions of himself, when he was talking about himself, Nietzsche used to say, "I am more of a battlefield than a man," which I love. And he also felt that the only way to kind of move through the suffering again was the will to power, right? It's creative self-expression. Overcome yourself, become bigger than you are. Now, the interesting thing here about all this is that Nietzsche also agreed, by the way, with Jung. And we'll see this when we start to talk about Carl Jung a little later. Jung was really clear here. He said, yeah, mommy and culture weigh a lot, and you have to overcome them. But after you've overcome them, you got to go right at your darkness, right? Jung called it your shadow side. That's the way forward. Nietzsche absolutely agreed, right? He wrote, as I said earlier, that Übermensch translates as Superman. So I'm translating out of the German here. And he wrote, I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? It's also, with all the fancy language aside, understand all he's saying here, right? What he's saying is passion, purpose, grit, flow. This is the path to high performance. That's really what he's saying. That's how we boil it down. Most importantly, and this is sort of key to Nietzsche, and it shifts back and forth, but it also shows up in a lot of the spiritual literature spiritual traditions. So, give you an example. When I was 18 years old, my first novel is a retelling of an ancient Kabbalistic Jewish story. And a lot of it happened because I went to my rabbi. I was like 17, 18 years old. I was raised Jewish, and I heard about this thing called Kabbalah, and I was intrigued. And I asked my rabbi to explain Kabbalah to me. Teach me Kabbalah. And he said, "Well, you're not 40 years old. You're not a Talmud scholar, not a Torah scholar. I will not teach it to you. This is forbidden knowledge." and I said screw the rabbi and wrote a book about it. So Nietzsche felt the same way as my rabbi. He said high performance is not for everybody. He actually thought less than 10% of the population should actually try high performance, and he was not a fan of most people. He thought most people were— he thought the herd mentality was prevalent. He called them sheep and cows, right? And there were two types of the herd. There was the last man and the slave, right? The last man is governed by the hunt for short-term pleasure, right? This is the mediocre man who is blind to higher values and is just seeking, oh, this glass of wine and this sexual escapade and this television program and, oh, I can watch Netflix and blah, blah, blah. So wasn't very impressed with the last man. And the other half was the slave, which he thought was worse. And the slave was a mentality where you try to bring people down, you burn out the geniuses. Anytime you see somebody expressing your will to power, This is the nail that sticks out gets hammered down kind of idea, right? And if you worship comfort and conformity, the herd wins, right? You needed that lofty goal to rise above. But again, Nietzsche didn't think everybody was capable. He thought really just maybe 10% of the population could pull this off. Everybody else, not so much. You're sort of screwed. So Nietzsche kicks off our discussion. He did so at a specific point in time, right? He was doing his early work in the 1870s, and I want to just give you a picture of what else is going on in the world, right? So 1873, one year after Nietzsche has published his first major work, which is The Birth of Tragedy, a German physiologist named Wilhelm Wundt publishes Principles of Physiological Psychology, which is a big deal. It establishes the field of experimental psychology. That's the very thing Nietzsche wanted, a rigorous, experimental, evolutionary-minded approach to the human mind. Wilhelm Wundt gives us, and it's a big deal because up until this moment in time, psychology had been a part of physiology. It wasn't its own field. Wilhelm Wundt breaks it off, and he introduces a notion that's going to show up again and again and again, which is introspection, right? Looking inward to examine our thoughts, our feelings, our consciousness. This becomes phenomenology, right? And after Freud essentially swallows psychology for 30 to 40 years, phenomenology, Phenomenology is a fancy way of saying, how does this make me feel? What's going on inside me? So by looking inward, by introducing introspection, you notice that all he's doing is essentially introducing a very Eastern philosophical, spiritual idea into the Western psychological tradition almost at its root. Right. And once— big deal in High Performance is he starts through introspection. He starts breaking apart all the little components—habit, attention—all the things, by the way, that you see in where they talk about in Eastern meditation traditions suddenly get introduced into the psychology of high performance. And suddenly we're looking at attention. We're trying to study these things and measure them experimentally. And a great example of this. So this was at a time, by the way, when science and industry were not separated at all. So Wundt, one of his early contracts, he's hired by a German beer manufacturer, and the beer manufacturer wants to know, is there a perfect amount of bitterness in beer that everybody's going to love? So if I can get my beer to this perfect amount of bitterness, I've nailed it. So Wundt does a whole bunch of experiments, and what he discovers is what we now know in physiology as the Ercs-Dobson curve. And this is going to come back We'll come back later when we talk about the neurobiology of flow, but what he discovers is there's a sweet spot for attention, and that below this sweet spot, there's not enough of a stimulus, AKA you're bored, you're not paying enough attention to the thing. So if there's bitter in the beer and you can't really notice it's bitter, it's not having an impact, right? And then there's the sweet spot, it's the perfect amount of bitterness or the perfect amount of whatever sensation. And above that, whoa, way too much. It's anxiety. It's freaking me out. There's too much bitterness. I don't like how this tastes, or I don't like— this noise is too loud. In between is a sweet spot. Psychologists now talk about that sweet spot as the flow channel. And it turns out when we get to flow hacking and how to produce this state of consciousness at will, this sweet spot discovered way back when, when a guy was looking for the perfect bitter beer here turns out to be a really big key. So psychology— Nietzsche's doing his work. He's saying, hey, we need a science of spirituality. In a sense, we need a science of high performance. It's got to be based on evolution. It's got to be based on experiment. And Wundt comes along and does just that. Now, simultaneously, right, the science of spirituality is getting kicked off, and it's getting kicked by a guy named Albert Heim. Now, if you've read my book Rise of Superman, you may be familiar with Heim's story. I want to retell it here because it's so important. The year is 1871, and Heim is a Swiss geologist, and he's gonna go on later in his life, he's gonna do really foundational work on the geological structure of the Alps, and he's gonna be a member of the Oxford Royal Society. Back then, he is still making a name for himself. It's 1871, and he and his brother brother, and 3 friends, and they set out and they're gonna climb the Santis, which is the 12th highest peak in Switzerland. Now, all 5 men had been playing in the Alps since they were children, but none of them were considered experienced mountaineers because the issue is historical. No one back then was an experienced mountaineer, right? The first recorded climb in history, mountaineering expedition, belongs to Emperor Hadrian. It's 121 AD, and he campers up Mount Etna to watch the sunrise, right? The modern birth of mountain climbing is often dated to a guy named Sir Alfred Willis, who in 1854 went up the Wetterhorn. The funny thing, by the way, is that he's not often credited with it. Other people had actually been to the top of that peak, other Germans, but Alfred was an Englishman, and the English were then keeping score. So Willis's contracts sort of marks the birth of systematic mountaineering, the birth of what's known as the Golden Age of Alpinism. It's a decade-long stretch where most of the first peaks in the Alps are climbed. Heim doesn't arrive in time for the Golden Age of Alpinism. He's a few years too late, so there are no peakbagging exploits credited his name. In fact, he's not remembered at all for contributing to mountaineering history, but he is remembered as the point that history took a turn for the Weird. So Haim is high up on the Santis and he is trying to cross a snowy ridge and a blizzard has blown in and he can no longer see straight and he's in the middle of this rocky ledge. The way forward is down a dicey slope, steep, it's narrow, there's cliffs on all sides. All 5 people, they're arguing, they don't know what to do. Should they go forward? Should they go back? Right? And Haim decides he's gonna set out and in the moment he steps forward. The wind blows, pulls his hat off his head. Without trying to think about it, he tries to snatch it back, right? This motion unbalances him, right? And the angle of the perch does the rest. He falls sideways, he flips upside down, he spins around backwards, and before anyone can react, he's rocketing towards the lip of the cliff with no way to slow down. His ice axe is out of reach, right? He tries driving his hands into the ground, but his skull keeps slamming into rocks. His finger gets ground pulp, and even before the pain can register, he is airborne. And while his actual flight covered 60 feet and lasted a few more seconds, that was not Himes' experience at all. The first thing he had noticed is he had dropped out of normal waking state reality into an entirely other dimension. His senses are heightened, his vision feels panoramic, time has slowed to an absolute crawl, right? And he can see his brother, he can see his friends, he can see the horrifying terrified look on their faces as they see what's going on, but as he later explained, he felt no anxiety, no trace of despair or pain, rather a calm seriousness, a profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness. And with his life unfolding in slow motion, Haim has time to survey the entire territory and make rescue plans. He imagines scenarios for slight injuries and serious injuries and where he's going to land and how how he's gonna bounce and how his companions are gonna get down to his body. And then he thinks, "Oh, I'll be dead and they won't be able to find my body and I'll be unable to deliver the lecture I'm supposed to give at Oxford University a few days from now. Oh my God, it's my first major Oxford lecture and they're gonna need to find a substitute." And then he says goodbye to his friends and his family and he's still falling. And then he realizes that if he survives his fall, he's gonna need to wake himself up clear his head, so he's got vinegar for just this purpose in his backpack, in his rucksack. And then, as he later recounted, "I heard a dull thud and my fall was over." Haim survived the impact, but the mystery of what happened never left him. Panoramic vision, time dilation, heavenly music, none of it made any sense, right? And he's a scientist by training, so he decides he wants to investigate this. And he does what becomes becomes the first study of near-death experiences ever undertaken, right? And he finds 32 other climbers, all of whom have survived near-fatal accidents, and a staggering 95% of this study group reported similar weird events, right? What was causing them is going to be a matter of really long debate, but it's the first scientific investigation that determines, first fall, high-risk activity can have a profound impact on consciousness, right? And can improve our mental states, right? He was incredibly clear-headed in his thinking, right? He writes this up in 1892 in a monograph called Remarks on Fatal Falls. And historians still consider it, as I mentioned, the first written account of near-death experiences. But the term is really misleading. A lot of Himes subjects reported experienced these profoundly altered states without actually being in real jeopardy. They only thought they were in life-threatening situations. And that's the key detail, right? If these experiences are mystical, if they only arose in dire straits, right, when our life is on the line, then perhaps they really were communications from beyond the beyond. But if it's perception and psychology that are the triggers, meaning I wasn't actually in a life-threatening situation, I just thought I was in a life situation, then the puzzle is more physiological than paranormal. And that opens the door for a lot of really interesting possibilities. So everything I talk about is the science of spirituality is the exploration of those interesting possibilities. So one of the first to know these possibilities and one of my great heroes is the Harvard philosopher, psychologist, and physician William James. So the philosopher Alfred Whitehead once said there are four great Western thinkers: Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, and William James. For a long time, he was definitely the most famous psychologist in the world. He sort of got replaced by Freud, but he is absolutely a high-performance philosopher in the Nietzsche tradition and an experimentalist in the Wundt tradition. And by experimentalist, like, I just want you to understand kind of the time and the era and what they got to work with. So he also Wundt's introspection technique, and he notices that consciousness is actually a stream of consciousness. It's made up of these discrete moments, these bits, particles, not waves, to use a physics analogy, right? So he wonders, how long is the now? How long are these particles? Right? So he runs this great early experiment in timing the now. He's got a stopwatch, pocket watch actually, his time as thoughts, and he decides that the now lasts 12 to 30 seconds depending on what's going on. Mostly it's about 12 seconds. And one of the reasons I mention this is this study has been repeated and repeated and repeated, and this guy in the 1880s sitting in a room with a watch, time as thoughts, came up with 12 seconds, and now 150 years later we've got atomic clocks we can measure down to the whatever. Turns out the now is 14 seconds. Seconds long on average. He was off by 2 seconds, which is not bad. He also— James is an amazing, amazing character. He's had an amazing, amazing life. His father is this incredibly eccentric theologian. The whole world— Emerson, Thoreau— passes through his Boston home, all of them. His brother is Henry James the novelist, right? And his brother is something of a problem for William as he's growing up. By the time Henry was 19, he's already writing, and he's getting famous by the time he's like 26. At this time, James doesn't have a clue what he wants to do with his life. He eventually goes to Harvard, but back then, Harvard was a brand-new institution, and it was crazy. The faculty was random. James later said that just living through the experience was a big deal. This is not the Harvard that we think of today, right? And he studied studies physiology and philosophy, but what he wants to study is psychology, but it's not yet a field. And James actually is the man who convinces the dean of Harvard at that time that he should be able to teach a class in what becomes psychology. So he's often talked about as the godfather of American psychology, and he wrote, published in 1890, we're gonna talk more about this in a second, the very first psychology textbook. Biology textbook. But more importantly, what I want to start with, with James, is he comes out of Harvard and he has a serious bout of depression. And it's bad. Panic attacks, hallucinations, can barely get out of bed. And his father, later in his life, suffered the same problem. And James, usually influenced by Darwin, right, is worried that biology is destiny, that he actually has no control of his life, and that the depression— they're never going anywhere. They're just going to get worse and worse and worse. And he concludes that free will itself is an illusion. And he stays in bed for years. And then in 1870, he reads an essay by Charles René LeVar, and something in the essay works. Everything starts to calm down. And he has this insight. He decides, 'cause he's been put into this panic by the fact that he doesn't have free will, he decides he's gonna believe in free will. He's gonna test out his belief in free will by believing in free will, or as he said, "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." And the crazy thing is it works. James feels better, a lot better. He gets out of bed, he gets back to Harvard, he gets his life together. He becomes one of the world's greatest thinkers. And it leads him to what I think of as his first sort of great conclusion. The great thing then in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. And this idea is, I think, the foundation of kind of the modern science of high performance, right? And he is very scientific about it, but he's also— James is incredibly open-minded. And as we'll see in a minute, he's very open-minded to a lot of spiritual ideas. And he is trying to hold, just like Nietzsche tried to hold, both the kind of spiritual side and the scientific side at once. And this is a really famous quote by James when he was talking about this idea. The point which as evolutionists we are bound to hold fast to, is that all the new forms of being that make their appearance are really nothing more than the results of the redistribution of unchanging materials. The selfsame atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains. And the evolution of the brain, if understood would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed. In this story, no new natures, no factors not present at the beginning, are introduced at any later stage. But with the dawn of consciousness, an entirely new nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency was not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos. Us, right? He's saying there's a mystery here. Something else is going on. And before we get to kind of his exploration of the mystery, just like we did with Nietzsche, I want to walk you through a little of James because James is interesting. Nietzsche says, hey, high performance, it is not for everyone. 10% of you people might be able to pull it off, but everybody else, you're screwed. James comes along, and he's the great democratizer. He says, no, no, no, Nietzsche is right about high performance, self-actualization, and all that, but he is really wrong. Everybody is capable of high performance, of self-actualization, of self-overcoming. And he argued that all of us are capable of so much more than we know, writing, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts parts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of a hysteric subject, but with less excuse. For the poor hysteric is diseased, while the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit, the habit of inferiority to our full self. That is bad. The habit of inferiority gets us to what James believes and where he agrees with Nietzsche. The unconscious is the heart of the problem, right? The habit of inferiority has to be about the unconscious. And he thinks there are two big levers that we have to rise above, habits and attention. These are the two biggest levers for high performance, right? He starts his very first psychology textbook, the very first one ever written. He's got a couple of introductory, this is the basics of neuroscience chapters, and then he gets into the psychology. And the first chapter is about habit. Why habit? James thought we were habit machines. He called habit the basic structure of mental life. Famous example that he used to give of is that we don't live in reality. Reality just has too much stuff in it to pay attention to. It's a miracle we can cross a room, James says, because there's so much stuff we could pay attention to. But we develop habits of attention that allow us to screen shit out, to filter things out, right? Better attentional habits can protect us against the power of the unconscious, the habit of inferiority. Against culture. James loved to paraphrase Aristotle about what's possible if you take this line of thinking out far enough. And he used to say, if you sow an action, you reap a habit. If you sow a habit, you reap a character. If you sow a character, you reap a destiny. Right? Habits are a superpower. And bad habits, like depression, is an outgrowth of poor habits. It's a debilitating habit. Of thought, right? So high performance in James's view is the result of good habits overcoming bad habits. And one of his really famous quotes about this was about a second wind and overcoming kind of our first wind and getting our second wind. And he writes, everybody knows what it is to start a piece of work, either intellectual or muscular, feeling stale. And everybody knows what it is to warm up to his job job. The process of warming up gets particularly striking in the phenomenon known as the second wind. On usual occasions, we make a practice of stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective layer of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked enough, so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on the side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a new level of energy, masked until then by the fatigue obstacle usually obeyed. In exceptional cases, we may find, beyond the extremity of fatigue distress, a amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own. Sources of strength habitually not taxed at all because habitually we never pushed through the obstruction, never passed through those early critical points. So this is what James is talking about when it comes to habit. Now, James doesn't think attention and habit alone are going to get it done. James is also really intrigued about the spiritual side of things, and he's really interested in flow. James— and this is, by the way, true of Nietzsche, it's true of most of the great thinkers in the 1800s— is a serious athlete. He does a ton of mountaineering, a ton of hiking. He's an avid tennis player. And while he's teaching at Harvard, he's also one of science's wilder men, right? He's this extreme sensation seeker who's often running experiments on himself. And a lot of those experiments involve psychedelics, which in the late 1800s 1900s was primarily nitrous oxide, laughing gas. But he toys with mescaline, which is discovered a little later in his life, and we'll talk about that as we move further along. But at the same time that he's doing all these experiments on himself and doing this introspective work and kind of laying the foundation for psychology, he is also doing a giant survey of the world's spiritual literature, right? He wants to come up with an accurate a catalog of all the possible types of mystical experiences and their psychological ramifications. And he really— he's looking at Eastern traditions, Hindu traditions, Tibetan traditions. He's also looking at Quaker traditions. He's spending a lot of time in séances, which are very, very popular in the late 1800s. So he's all over the board, right? And one of the things he notices It doesn't really matter what drug he seems to try or what spiritual tradition he studies, all these so-called mystical experiences have similar commonalities. Same variations on the theme that Albert Heim reported: the vanishing of the sense of self, time dilation, a feeling of oneness with everything, a radical clarity of thought. Now, he notices a couple couple really key details. The first is that on the other side of these mystical experiences, people are radically different. The experiences are psychologically profound. On the other side of these experiences, people are happier, they're more content, they're significantly more fulfilled, and the results are undeniable, right? So it doesn't matter how fantastic the nature of the events are, what the story that surrounds the event are, right? Doesn't matter if it's a Christian mystic who's believing something about Jesus being raised from the dead, or the Buddha believing what— it doesn't matter what— that's the package, right? Doesn't matter what the package is, what the story is, right? These stories could be true, they could be bullshit, we don't know. He doesn't care because he's saying, look, even if they're bullshit, the effect is not. The effect is profoundly psychologically real. Real, right? He writes, these are states of insight into the depth of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations full of significance and importance, and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime, meaning they're powerful. We have the experience and we believe it's real. And he also writes, on the other end, we discover a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, an assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections. So what is he saying? He's saying spiritual experiences calm you down, they make you feel safer and more loving. And he discovers 4 fruits of religious spiritual experience that occur no matter what the experience is, no matter whether or not you think the belief that underpinned the experience is true or not, all these experiences produced elation and freedom. Selfhood makes a way. There is a shift towards love, and there is an awareness of a larger power, of a force greater than oneself, right? He also notices, right, when it comes to flow and high-risk experience, he extends this idea to Albert Heimann and said, hey, wait Wait a minute, high-risk experience produces a spiritual experience. It also heightens our mental faculties. And James notices that there's a physical impact as well, right? You don't just get mental high performance out of these states, you also get physical high performance out of these states, right? And all of this, right, leads him to what is one of his most famous conclusions about consciousness. Probably heard this before. And he says most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousnesses and the soul's resources in general, much like a man who out of his whole organism should get into the habit of using and moving only his little finger. Right. But James also realizes, right, like, we're not doomed to stay this way. And one of the secrets to James's high performance is having these experiences, these spiritual experiences, and writing, our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness. While all about us, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all of their completeness. So what is that reckless stimulus for him? Definitely pointed out that psychedelic drugs will provoke these experiences as a host of spiritual experiences. But he also shares Haim's opinion, writing in his really famous book on all this work, The Varieties of Religious Experience: Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we supposed. And finally, Finally, James is a huge proponent, like Nietzsche, in cosmic consciousness, in some kind of cosmic unity, in an awake universe. In fact, he wrote, "The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious, vital realization of our oneness with this infinite life and the opening of ourselves to this divine inflow." Note the use of the word flow. To recognize our own divinity and our own intimate relation to the universe is to attach the belts of our machinery to the powerhouse of the universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to. We can rise to any heaven we ourselves choose, and when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the universe combine to help us heavenward. Now that is a fairly spiritual statement from the guy who is credited with kind of founding modern psychology. So at this point in time, right, late 1800s, early 1900s, science of spirituality, science of high performance, they're all really tied together. And then comes Freud and everything sort of goes to hell and he changes everything. Freud kicks off what I talk about as the 100-year detour. But he starts out really similar to James, right? They're both obsessed with consciousness. Right? They've got similar interests. One of James's big discoveries, some say it's his biggest, was that our hopes and our desires and our needs are the cornerstones of our belief system and that those beliefs actually shape reality. Right? They shape the world as we experience it. Freud agreed. Right? But he felt that our hopes, our beliefs, and our desires, they got a mind of their own, our unconscious mind that influenced is everything, right? This is basically Darwin 40 years later. What Freud is saying— what we've learned from Darwin is that there are these primal animal instincts, and what Freud is saying is those instincts are still running through the unconscious, right? This is why you never get to sort of get beyond the weight of mommy and culture. One of the other things that Freud points out is it's the pleasure The pleasure principle. And it's worth talking about this for a second because it's wrong, but it's interesting how it's wrong. So Freud's idea is, hey, human beings are driven by, we wanna run from pain and we wanna run towards pleasure. That's what we all do all the time. That's the basic instinct, the pleasure principle. Well, it turns out actually, and we're gonna hear more about this later on, that the experience that people enjoy the most life is flow. And interestingly, flow shows up for reasons that we're going to get to later when we are using our skills to the utmost, when we are pushing ourselves. And oftentimes, as in athletics for sure, it shows up when you're in horrific physical pain. You may not notice the pain, but it's there. So skiers, right, that you may be in flow on the run down and then on the chairlift up, you're in horrific pain. So Freud was wrong. It is not we run from pain and towards pleasure because the experience that people will seek out the most can often be a very painful experience. So Freud is wrong. And Nietzsche, by the way, with we have to go through our suffering to break through to the other side, Nietzsche's probably a little more right here. But Freud sort of takes it sideways, right? So Freud thinks we're governed by these instincts, and he thinks that most of our psychological issues are repressed childhood trauma. And this is where Freud is totally wrong, right? He is obsessed with repressed sexual desires, with repressed childhood trauma, and we just don't repress things in the way that Freud thought. That's what the neuroscience and the psychology shows, right? But we do form remarkably bad habits around these things. So James was right. Freud really never felt you could get past the weight of mom and culture. He did say, you know, with enough psychoanalysis, you can sort of get free of it. And what he thought on the other side was some kind of higher love experience. But he really doesn't think you can you can't get away from your own crazy, right? That mommy and culture, they just weigh too much. And culture is stored in the unconscious and the wound is too deep, right? And when I talked about the 100-year detour earlier, what happened there is Freud basically— while James was really open to spirituality, Freud was not, right? He thought religion and spirituality were fairy tales. He called— he thought they were neuroses. Had no place in science. And, you know, while James talked about that oceanic feeling of cosmic unity, right, Freud thought this was like a neurotic regression into the womb and a symptom of psychopathology, right? Very different interpretations of the same experience. And big point with Freud is Freud says, hey, you know, all this stuff William James, Nietzsche, all that high performance, that's neat, That's fantastic, but psychology, we're not doing that. We're about fixing pathological problems, right? We're not about exploring psychological possibilities. And this kicks off the 100-year detour. Now, there are a couple exceptions in the detour, and I wanna poke at them. And obviously you can't talk about Freud without talking a little bit about Jung. And Jung is interesting, 'cause Jung agreed agrees, right, with Nietzsche and James and Freud that culture weighs a lot, right? But he breaks with Freud. He says, wait a minute, there's a whole lot more going on than just repressed sexuality and childhood trauma. And what he adds to our discussion, I think, are 3 critical ideas, right? First, he picks up Nietzsche's idea and James's idea and Darwin's idea that the mind is evolving, right? Now, this is an idea that is really prevalent in psychology that minds evolve, and it sort of disappears in the 1970s. And I'm not quite sure why, but people are really concerned with it for a while, and Jung included. Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, he writes, each with a long evolutionary history, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. By history, I do not mean the to the fact that the mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the past through language and other cultural traditions. I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of an animal. Right. So in a sense, this is James' habits. This is Freud's instincts. Right. He has a slightly different term for it. But he also realizes that personality types, right, are residuals of this mental evolution. They're the survival strategies that worked, so they got passed down, right? And he breaks the mind apart into 4 parts. He's got the conscious mind, what we know. Then he's got the ego, which is the gatekeeper of consciousness. It's sort of an organizing principle. Then he's got the personal unconscious, our memory, our unconscious fixations. And then he's got a term that I'm sure you've heard and often gets misused: the collective unconscious. When Jung uses this, he does not mean this in a woo-woo metaphysical way, right? The collective unconscious are where the archetypes live, and these are cultural survival strategies. So it can be fear of snakes, right? Inherited These are fears. These are thought patterns. These are behavior patterns, right? Archetypes are essentially descriptions of how culture weighs on us, which is why Jung writes, there are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, right? And what he means by that is that we got a slot in our brain for for birth, for death, for rebirth, for power, for hero, for child. These are his archetypes. These are cultural ideas that have been passed down and down and down and down. Now, Jung's goal, same as Nietzsche's goal, same as James's goal, it's self-actualization, right? Jung's term is individualization, right? It's developing all of who you are. And this includes your archetypes, right? So your archetypes are different different aspects of your personality that Jung says you have to cultivate, blend together, and then confront their shadow side, right? But the archetypes are essentially how we carry the weight of the past into the present through neuronal structures. This becomes Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, which says, wow, there are these fundamental structures in the brain that affect the way we perceive reality. Or Chomsky comes along and says, oh, we've We've got this innate universal grammar. And this is Derrida's views on language that we talked about. And in a weird way, if you sort of blend everything together, right, and you strip out the fancy language— and Jung was got to be one of the most confusing, difficult writers in the history of the universe. But what we really get underneath it is a methodology that says, look, high performance, human flourishing, you got to deal with your past. You've got to confront your darkness. You've got to alter your habits. You gotta have frequent ecstatic state experiences, and you have to be creative and innovative in how you live and how you approach your life, right? This is essentially high-performance Nietzsche through Jung. And this wraps up part 1, the actualization of self-actualization. What are the big takeaways here? What does it mean to you? Well, if you've got any interest in high performance or any interest in a spiritual path, what you're gonna see is the kernels of everything we believe today, right? We have founding ideas like passion and purpose are critical to high performance. You gotta start with one, otherwise there's not enough energy in the system to move it forward. We see that things like habit and attention are the tools with which we can fight back against the kind of sort of the waves of culture and the baggage that we carry from our family history and those sorts of things. And we start to see the very foundation of an exploration of spirituality using the scientific method, right? It's the first time in history we're trying to apply the tools of science to these questions of spirituality. And it's the first time that we're doing it without a God. Right? So, God has been stripped out of the equation and people are trying to figure out, well, if this is not true, why are we believing all these things? What's it good for? What's going on? So, these have got to be all the kinds of questions you ask yourself along the way. These thinkers were asking the same questions back in the 1870s, just armed with so much less knowledge than we have today to try to solve them.

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