Not the OM You Think

On altered states, ritual, and the difference between transformation and entertainment

I still remember the effect that Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal's book Stealing Fire had on me when it came out. One of the ideas that stayed with me most strongly was the suggestion that altered states are not some marginal curiosity of human culture. They appear much more deeply woven into life itself.

What surprised me in particular was the observation that many living beings seem to seek altered states in one form or another, as if there is something in biological life that occasionally needs to loosen its usual grip on the world. Patterns that once worked stop working. A creature, a mind, a whole nervous system reaches a limit in its current model of reality. Something has to break open a little so that a new pattern can form.

Seen from that angle, altered states are not merely about thrill, escape, or intoxication. At their best, they are a way of interrupting stale behaviour and allowing for a reorganisation that ordinary consciousness, with all its habits and routines, may not be capable of producing on its own.

When the Ordinary Mind Stops Being Enough

That same year I joined a Wim Hof winter expedition, and it changed my understanding of all this from theory into something lived.

We did things I would previously have classified as slightly absurd, or at least far beyond what I would have imagined myself doing. Standing in a sub-zero waterfall for long minutes. Climbing Sniezka in Poland wearing little more than shorts while the wind chill pushed the temperature deep into punishing territory. Hours in conditions that would make most people turn around well before the start.

What made it possible was not brute force in the ordinary sense. It was breath. More precisely, it was the way certain breathing patterns can organise attention, emotion, and the body into a state that feels less like effort and more like alignment.

I remember the final breathwork session before the ascent especially clearly. At some point I had a vivid inner image of walking through a forest with myself, as if another layer of me had stepped out and become a companion. That other presence was calm. It told me not to worry, that the journey would be easy. When I came out of it, I was in tears.

What struck me was not the drama of the moment, but the directness of it. I had not expected that one could encounter one's own inner life with that degree of immediacy, almost as if speaking to another person. The experience did not feel like fantasy in the cheap sense. It felt more like contact - a line opened for a few minutes between the ordinary surface mind and something quieter, older, and more trustworthy underneath.

None of this is really new, of course. Human beings have been using altered states for a very long time in order to find orientation, courage, healing, insight, or simply a way through situations that the normal mind cannot solve with its existing categories.

Breath, fasting, rhythm, music, dance, silence, cold, heat, sex, plants, prolonged prayer, chanting - these have all been used, in different cultures and with different metaphysical language, to produce shifts in consciousness strong enough to make a person less fixed for a while. Once loosened, something can sometimes be seen, felt, grieved, reordered, or released that would otherwise remain locked behind habit.

When Ritual Becomes Entertainment

The problem is not that such practices exist. The problem is that modern culture is unusually good at stripping them of their frame.

We take techniques that once lived inside ritual, symbolism, taboo, preparation, discipline, and community, and reduce them to lifestyle products or recreational experiences. What was once used carefully to move through fear, trauma, or creative impasse becomes one more way to have a good time, numb out, or collect stories.

That flattening does more damage than people realize. When a practice loses its symbolic and ethical container, it often also loses the very conditions that made it useful in the first place. What remains may still be intense, pleasurable, or unusual, but intensity by itself is not transformation. Sometimes it is just stimulation with better branding.

This is part of why so many legitimate practices end up in one of two bad categories in the modern West. Either they are trivialised and commercialised, or they become taboo because people mostly encounter them in their degraded form. Very little space remains for disciplined use.

Tantra is one of the clearest examples. In its Western costume, the word usually points toward a vague mixture of sexuality, spirituality, and self-expression. In the classical traditions, that is a drastic simplification. Sexual elements existed in some lineages, but they were neither casual nor central in the way modern marketing suggests. They were embedded in systems of preparation, symbolism, hierarchy, vows, and constraints that made them unsuitable for most people most of the time.

Once you remove those structures, what remains is usually not tantra at all. It is just appetite, projection, or therapeutic theatre dressed in borrowed language.

That does not mean everything modern or Western is necessarily degraded. Some newer methods are genuinely useful. The breathwork popularised by Wim Hof, for all the branding around it, clearly gives many people direct access to states they would otherwise never touch. I have seen enough of that world to take its effects seriously, even if I would not explain them in exactly the language its followers sometimes prefer.

The Work Is in the Container

There are other practices as well, including OM, one of those practices so easy to misunderstand that the misunderstanding starts the moment the acronym is spoken.

What interests me in those cases is not the label but the architecture. This is the same basic logic I described in Rules, Space, and Growth: structure creates the space in which something subtler can actually happen. In some partnered rituals, the whole effect depends less on what is being done than on what is prevented from happening around it. The roles have to be clear. The timing has to be exact. The frame has to close cleanly. There has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Ideally there is some short period of down-regulation afterwards so that the nervous system can settle rather than simply being dropped.

The point is not spontaneity. The point is the opposite. Precision creates the conditions in which spontaneity of a deeper kind becomes possible.

From the outside, this can seem almost overly formal. Why exact time limits? Why such clear behavioural constraints? Why draw the boundaries so tightly? Because without them, the whole thing becomes something else.

This is especially obvious in rituals that involve polarity, intimacy, or strong energetic charge. The slightest ambiguity about what might happen next changes the atmosphere immediately. A nervous system does not care very much about good intentions in the abstract. It responds to whether the structure is solid enough to trust.

If there is even a small doubt that the container may be violated, the practice loses depth very quickly. The person who is supposed to soften will remain partly guarded. The person who is supposed to serve the ritual may quietly start serving ego, appetite, fantasy, or performance instead. What was meant to become a fine instrument for attention turns back into ordinary psychology.

Immature energy, especially when mixed with male ambition, tends to fail exactly there. It wants to push past the frame, improvise, add, possess, or turn the ritual into proof of something. But the frame is not an inconvenience. It is the thing doing most of the work.

That is also why mature settings often rely on external safeguards rather than trust alone. A witness nearby, someone behind a door, a partner who understands the structure, a clean start and clean stop, a brief check-in afterwards - all of that may look unnecessary to people who think only in terms of desire or technique. In practice, it is what allows the ritual to remain a ritual instead of collapsing into a social or sexual blur.

This is true far beyond intimacy. The same principle applies whether the doorway is breath, cold, chanting, dance, psychedelics, or something quieter and harder to name. The altered state itself is not the achievement. In many ways it is the easy part. The difficult part is building a container strong enough that something meaningful can happen once the usual mental structure softens.

Without that container, people often end up mistaking transgression for depth. They think intensity means insight, or that breaking a norm automatically makes an experience liberating. Usually it does not. Often it just scrambles the surface for a while and leaves the deeper pattern untouched.

What the Name Obscures

What actually changes people, in my experience, is a more careful sequence. A strong enough method to interrupt the old state. A precise enough frame to make the interruption safe. And enough symbolic weight around the act that the psyche understands that something real is happening and responds accordingly.

This is why I no longer find it very interesting to ask whether a given practice is "esoteric," "scientific," "traditional," or "modern." Those labels matter less than people think. The better question is whether the practice has kept the conditions that allow it to do real work.

Can it loosen a rigid pattern without simply dissolving the person into chaos? Can it bring buried material to the surface without turning that exposure into spectacle? Can it open a person enough for new perception while also protecting the space in which that perception has a chance to reorganize life afterward?

If the answer is yes, then I tend to take the practice seriously, even if the language around it is clumsy or the culture surrounding it is mixed. If the answer is no, then what remains may still be entertaining, sensual, dramatic, or marketable, but it is unlikely to be transformative in any durable sense.

Most people, when they hear certain words or initials, already think they know what is being referred to. They picture chanting, sex, spectacle, mysticism, or some slightly embarrassing form of self-help theatre. And for readers who have not already guessed it, yes, one of the examples here is orgasmic meditation. I left it as OM at first on purpose, because the full term tends to trigger a whole set of assumptions before the actual mechanics of ritual, safety, and attention can even be considered.

But the more interesting question is not what the acronym stands for. It is whether we still remember how to build a ritual strong enough to let a human being change.