Not the OM You Think

I still remember what Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal's book Stealing Fire did to me when it came out. One idea stayed with me especially: that altered states are not some strange side thing of human culture. They seem to be woven much deeper into life itself.

What surprised me most was the observation that many living beings look for altered states in one or another form. As if there is something in biological life that needs to loosen its grip on the world from time to time. Patterns that worked before stop working. A creature, a mind, a whole nervous system hits the limit of its current model of reality, and something has to break open a little so a new pattern can form.

From that angle altered states are not only about thrill, escape or getting high. In the best case they interrupt stale behaviour and allow some reorganisation which the ordinary consciousness, with all its habits and routines, probably can't produce by itself.

When the normal mind is not enough

The same year I joined a Wim Hof winter expedition, and it turned all of this from theory into something I lived.

We did things I would have called a bit absurd before, or at least far beyond what I imagined myself doing. Standing for long minutes in a waterfall below zero. Climbing Śnieżka in Poland in not much more than shorts, while the wind chill pushed the temperature deep into the painful zone. Hours in conditions where most people would turn around long before the start.

What made it possible was not brute force. It was the breath, more precisely the way certain breathing patterns organise attention, emotions and the body into a state that feels less like effort and more like being aligned.

I remember the last breathwork session before the ascent very clearly. At some point I had a vivid inner image: I was walking through a forest together with myself, as if another layer of me stepped out and became a companion. This other me was calm. He told me not to worry, the journey will be easy. When I came out of it, I was crying.

What hit me was not the drama but how direct it was. I didn't expect that one can meet his own inner life so immediately, almost like talking to another person. It didn't feel like fantasy in the cheap sense. More like contact, like a line was open for a few minutes between the normal surface mind and something quieter and older underneath, something I could trust.

None of this is new of course. Humans use altered states since a very long time to find orientation, courage, healing, insight or just a way through situations the normal mind can't solve with its categories.

Breath, fasting, rhythm, music, dance, silence, cold, heat, sex, plants, long prayer, chanting. All of this was used in different cultures and with different metaphysical language to shift consciousness strong enough so a person becomes less fixed for a while. And once loosened, sometimes something can be seen or felt, grieved, reordered or released, which otherwise stays locked behind habit.

When ritual becomes entertainment

The problem is not that such practices exist. The problem is that our modern culture is extremely good at stripping them from their frame.

We take techniques that once lived inside ritual, symbolism, taboo, preparation, discipline and community, and turn them into lifestyle products or some recreational experience. Something that was used carefully to move through fear, trauma or a creative dead end becomes one more way to have a good time, to numb out or to collect stories for the next party.

This flattening does more damage than people think. When a practice loses its symbolic and ethical container, it often loses exactly the conditions that made it useful. What remains can still be intense, pleasant or unusual. But intensity alone is not transformation. Sometimes it is just stimulation with better branding.

That's partly why so many legit practices end up in one of two bad boxes here in the West. Either they get trivialised and commercialised, or they become taboo because people mostly meet them in the degraded form. Very little space is left for a disciplined use.

Tantra is probably the clearest example. In its Western costume the word means some vague mix of sexuality, spirituality and self-expression. Compared to the classical traditions this is a drastic simplification. Sexual elements existed in some lineages, yes, but they were neither casual nor central like the modern marketing suggests. They were embedded in systems of preparation, symbols, hierarchy, vows and constraints, which made them unsuitable for most people most of the time.

Take those structures away and what remains is usually no tantra at all. Just appetite, projection or therapeutic theatre in borrowed language.

That doesn't mean everything modern or Western is degraded. Some newer methods are really useful. The breathwork Wim Hof made popular, with all the branding around it, clearly gives many people direct access to states they would never touch otherwise. I have seen enough of that world to take the effects seriously, even if I would not explain them exactly in the language some of its followers prefer.

The work is in the container

There are other practices too, like OM. One of those practices that are so easy to misunderstand that the misunderstanding starts the moment you say the acronym.

What interests me there is not the label but the architecture. It is the same logic I described in Rules, Space and Growth: structure creates the space in which something more subtle can actually happen. But how exact the structure is has to match how volatile the setting is. In some partnered rituals the whole effect depends less on what is done and more on what is prevented from happening around it. Roles have to be clear, timing has to be exact, the frame has to close cleanly. Beginning, middle, end. Ideally some short time to down-regulate afterwards, so the nervous system can settle and is not just dropped.

The point is not spontaneity, it's the opposite. Precision creates the conditions where a deeper kind of spontaneity becomes possible.

From the outside this can look almost too formal. Why exact time limits? Why so clear behavioural rules, why draw the boundaries so tight? Because some spaces are simply harder to hold than others. In rituals where intimacy, energetic charge and the chance of misreading each other are all turned up, looser rules don't create more freedom. They create leakage. The smallest ambiguity about what might happen next changes the whole atmosphere immediately. A nervous system doesn't care much about good intentions in the abstract, it reacts on whether the structure is solid enough to trust it. In such a setting the frame has to be tighter exactly so the inner experience can unfold without interference.

If there is even a small doubt that the container could be violated, the practice loses its depth very fast. The person who should soften stays partly on guard. The person who should serve the ritual may quietly start to serve his ego, appetite, fantasy or performance instead. And what was meant to be a fine instrument for attention falls back into ordinary psychology.

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

That's also why mature settings often rely on external safeguards and not only on trust. A witness nearby, someone behind the door, a partner who understands the structure, a clean start and a clean stop, a short check-in after. For people who think only in terms of desire or technique all of this may look unnecessary. In practice it is what keeps the ritual a ritual, instead of collapsing into some social or sexual blur.

And this goes far beyond intimacy. Same principle whether the door 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's the easy part. The hard part is to build a container strong enough so something meaningful can happen once the usual mental structure gets soft.

Without that container people often mistake transgression for depth. They think intensity means insight, or that breaking a norm automatically makes an experience liberating. Mostly it doesn't. Often it just scrambles the surface for a while and the deeper pattern stays untouched.

Beyond the labels

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

That's why I don't find it very interesting anymore to ask whether a practice is "esoteric", "scientific", "traditional" or "modern". These labels matter less than people think. The better question is whether the practice kept the conditions that let it do real work.

Can it loosen a rigid pattern without dissolving the person into chaos? Can it bring buried stuff to the surface without making a spectacle out of it? Can it open someone enough for new perception and at the same time protect the space where this perception has a chance to reorganise life afterwards?

If yes, I tend to take the practice seriously, even if the language around it is clumsy or the culture around it is mixed. If not, what remains may still be entertaining, sensual, dramatic or good to sell. Transformative in a lasting way it is probably not.