Steven Kotler Quotes

This isn’t just your mind paying more attention — suddenly your entire body is paying attention. When this happens, it’s outside our conscious capabilities. There are no words. Our language becomes that of the river. All the features of the river speak to you and you to them through motion. There is tension, threat, there is joy and release, and overall, a deep, deep sense of flow. You are literally part of the flow of the world.

These experiences were profound — people were radically different on the other side. Happier, more content, significantly more fulfilled.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

There wasn’t anything wrong with these dogs. I wanted to take them all home with me. The whole damn warehouse of misery. Just strap it to my back and get the fuck out of the way.

If you’re interested in mastery,” says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, “you have to learn this lesson. To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk — you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it.

the Altered States Economy totals out to roughly $4 trillion a year. That’s a sizable chunk of our income that we annually tithe to the Church of the Ecstatic. We spend more on this than we do on maternity care, humanitarian aid, and K–12 education combined.” It’s larger than the gross national product of Britain, India, or Russia. And to really put this in perspective, it’s twice as many dollars as there are known galaxies in the entire

Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?

The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill. Both common sense and evolutionary biology tell us that progress under these “ultimate” conditions should be a laggard’s game, but that’s not exactly what the data suggests.

This is a very important point. Flow carries within it delicious possibility. In the state, we are aligned with our core passion and, because of flow’s incredible impact on performance, expressing that passion to our utmost. Under normal conditions (playing chess, writing a report), this is empowering.

American spirituality has always favored the direct over the inferred, the immediate over the gradual.

brainwaves slow from agitated beta to daydreamy alpha and deeper theta. Neurochemically, stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol are replaced by performance-enhancing, pleasure-producing compounds such as dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, serotonin, and oxytocin.

In Lovelock's view the earth was a 'super-organism,' a cybernetic feedback system that 'seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.' At the suggestion of his neighbor, author and screenwriter William Goldman, he called the system Gaia after the ancient Greek Earth goddess.

And the benefits of selflessness go beyond silencing our inner critic. When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles — parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor — but, by then, we know they’re just costumes with zippers.

Es como el agua en el cubo en una noria. Si se vierte suficiente agua en un cubo, tarde o temprano se derrama en el siguiente cubo, y en el siguiente. Es así de mecánico.

The reasons there are so many clichés about universes inside of dewdrops is because there are universes inside of dewdrops.