AND LEARNING

SINCE I'VE DESCRIBED ESCAPE TO A HIGHER ORDER AS SOME process involving chaos, disorder, instability, perturbations, and collapsing like Paul on the road to Damascus in a state of total if temporary derangement, it's likely some wary reader is muttering, "Who needs this? These brain machines sound like something Dr. Frankenstein cooked up; you'll never get me in one of those things without a fight!"

But what we're talking about, after all, is simply a process of increasing brain coherence. It's a process that most people experience as one of the most pleasurable in life. It happens when making love, watching our child sleep, absorbing a work of art or being moved by music, perceiving beauty, feel- ing the birth of a new idea, and at all moments of self-realiza- tion, fulfillment, achievement, illumination, peace, and joy - the process of our brain's components rearranging

themselves to accommodate themselves to reality in a new way. It's an occurrence psychologist Abraham Maslow de- voted his career to exploring, and which he called having "peak experiences."

One characteristic of peak experiences is that they feel good. They feel so good that most of us would willingly have

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peak experiences as frequently as possible, and one of the most powerful human drives is toward peak experiences. Much of the energy and time we expend in our lives - in seeking or using sex, drugs, money, prestige, power, wisdom - is devoted to confused or misdirected attempts to have peak experiences. How nice if we could have them at will!

Unfortunately, peak experiences are not easy to come by. Throughout history there have been many attempts to devise techniques that would enable humans to trigger peak experi- ences, but these techniques (including types of yoga, medita- tion, tantricism, trance-inducing dance and music, fasting, drugs, and religious practices) sometimes have harmful side effects, and virtually always demand discipline and long ardu- ous practice. Discipline and practice are good things, in gen- eral, but in our skeptical and impatient culture, many people seek shortcuts. Too often these shortcuts, ranging from vora- cious materialism to mindless occultism, end up leaving the seekers dissatisfied, even more needful of peak experiences than they were when they set out on the shortcut. The end result is a loss of faith in the existence of peak experiences and higher states, a sneering dismissal of such levels of mental development as pure self-delusion by willowy souls too weak to face the facts about the cold, hard, brutal, peak-experience- less world.

Can people intentionally boost themselves into a higher order and induce authentic peak experiences? One way of ap- proaching the problem is to find out what are the components of peak (or, at the least, pleasurable) experiences; once these elements are known, we might be able to induce peak (or pleasurable) experiences by creating the necessary compo- nents. One scientist who has done this is Mihaly Csikszentmi- halyi of the University of Chicago. He concluded that such experiences are intrinsically rewarding - that is, we partici- pate in them not for external rewards, "not as compensation for past desires, not as preparation for future needs, but as an ongoing process which provides rewarding experiences in the Present."

To study this intrinsically rewarding behavior, Csikszent- 77

MEGABRAIN

However, many people axe not so eager; many people are quite determined to hang on to their present structure, thank you, and have no desire to escape to a higher order. For such people, the mental destabilization some of these devices can bring can be frightening. For this reason I want to emphasize here that the machines I describe should be used only by peo- ple who are fully willing, who understand that the devices can have and often are intended to have a somewhat disruptive, effect on the brain. People with rigid personality structures, with a strong need to feel in control, should approach these devices carefully, at their own speed.

BEYOND BOREDOM AND ANXIETY: THE LINK BETWEEN PEAK EXPERIENCES

AND LEARNING

SINCE I'VE DESCRIBED ESCAPE TO A HIGHER ORDER AS SOME process involving chaos, disorder, instability, perturbations, and collapsing like Paul on the road to Damascus in a state of total if temporary derangement, it's likely some wary reader is muttering, "Who needs this? These brain machines sound like something Dr. Frankenstein cooked up; you'll never get me in one of those things without a fight!"

But what we're talking about, after all, is simply a process of increasing brain coherence. It's a process that most people experience as one of the most pleasurable in life. It happens when making love, watching our child sleep, absorbing a work of art or being moved by music, perceiving beauty, feel- ing the birth of a new idea, and at all moments of self-realiza- tion, fulfillment, achievement, illumination, peace, and joy - the process of our brain's components rearranging themselves to accommodate themselves to reality in a new way. It's an occurrence psychologist Abraham Maslow de- voted his career to exploring, and which he called having "peak experiences."

One characteristic of peak experiences is that they feel good. They feel so good that most of us would willingly have

76

ASCENT TO A HIGHER ORDER

peak experiences as frequently as possible, and one of the most powerful human drives is toward peak experiences. Much of the energy and time we expend in our lives - in seeking or using sex, drugs, money, prestige, power, wisdom - is devoted to confused or misdirected attempts to have peak experiences. How nice if we could have them at will!

Unfortunately, peak experiences are not easy to come by. Throughout history there have been many attempts to devise techniques that would enable humans to trigger peak experi- ences, but these techniques (including types of yoga, medita- tion, tantricism, trance-inducing dance and music, fasting, drugs, and religious practices) sometimes have harmful side effects, and virtually always demand discipline and long ardu- ous practice. Discipline and practice are good things, in gen- eral, but in our skeptical and impatient culture, many people seek shortcuts. Too often these shortcuts, ranging from vora- cious materialism to mindless occultism, end up leaving the seekers dissatisfied, even more needful of peak experiences than they were when they set out on the shortcut. The end result is a loss of faith in the existence of peak experiences and higher states, a sneering dismissal of such levels of mental development as pure self-delusion by willowy souls too weak to face the facts about the cold, hard, brutal, peak-experience- less world.

Can people intentionally boost themselves into a higher order and induce authentic peak experiences? One way of ap- proaching the problem is to find out what are the components of peak (or, at the least, pleasurable) experiences; once these elements are known, we might be able to induce peak (or pleasurable) experiences by creating the necessary compo- nents. One scientist who has done this is Mihaly Csikszentmi- halyi of the University of Chicago. He concluded that such experiences are intrinsically rewarding - that is, we partici- pate in them not for external rewards, "not as compensation for past desires, not as preparation for future needs, but as an ongoing process which provides rewarding experiences in the Present."

To study this intrinsically rewarding behavior, Csikszent- 77

MEGABRA1N

mihalyi interviewed and studied chess players, rock climbers, surgeons, and others who did things not for external rewards but simply because they enjoyed them. He found that the underlying similarity of all these activities is that "they all give participants a sense of discovery, exploration, problem solution - in other words, a feeling of novelty and challenge." The outcome of these activities, he discovered, is uncertain ("like exploring a strange place") but "the actor is potentially capable of controlling it."

Csikszentmihalyi noticed that his informants often de- scribed their experiences by using the same word: flow. He concluded that the essential element of all peak experiences was this "flow." He found that while many sought their flow