By Jules Evans — 2017
You don’t need drugs or a church for an ecstatic experience that helps transcend the self and connect to something bigger
Read on aeon.co
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“How many surf bums who can’t keep a job washing dishes will be up at 5 AM putting on a gritty, sandy wetsuit to paddle out in cold, sharky water for just one shot at a barrel? That’s motivation. If you could bottle that, then what’s possible?”
According to ‘Stealing Fire’ authors Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, there’s a new $4 trillion high performance revolution fueling the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and high profile executives in Silicon Valley and Wall Street to the top of their game but no one on the mainstream level knows about it...
A few months back, Jamie had the chance to travel down to Sir Richard Branson’s Caribbean paradise, Necker Island, where he sat down with the Virgin magnate to discuss the role flow has played in helping shape his multi-billion dollar empire.
Sinewy and tanned from a life of outdoor pursuits, Mr. Wheal was offering attendees the chance to “upgrade” their nervous systems to meet this incontrovertible information overload. How? With “flow.” But what is flow?
Risky pursuits like BASE jumping offer a buzz better than any drug. New technologies provide the same rush without the danger.
For a long time, research into flow states was subjective—researchers had to rely on people’s self-reported experiences to understand altered states of mind.
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