Clinical psychologist Dr. Cardona notes:

“The stoke state is an ecstatic dissolution of boundary. It is a temporary loss of the

default mode network, replaced by a bottom-up flood of sensory data—wave, wind,

sun, salt—mapped directly onto the somatic field. What we call ‘stoke’ may in fact be

an embodied satori.”

What if we built our societies not around control, but around

flow? What if our institutions reflected not the mechanistic, but the oceanic? What if education

stoked curiosity like a wave? What if cities pulsed like jazz?

Surfing, especially in ecstatic resonance with cannabis, bypasses the heroic linear

and enters the mythic vertical—a spiral of continuous becoming.

That it is not a distortion of life, but a deeper fidelity to it.

That it is not a pathology, but a prototype.

The human being, in full bloom, is surfing.

Is stoned.

Is singing with the wave.

And literature professor Elias Wolfe adds:

“The stoked surfer is the contemporary dervish. He spins, but not in circles—he spins

along the curving spine of Poseidon’s dream. He is subject to no metric but that of the

wave’s breath. It is a kind of literature of the body, a grammar of liquid grace.”

Dr. Cardona elaborates:

“We have built a civilization that distrusts spontaneous well-being. In its place, we offer

conditional worth: achievement through effort, pleasure through purchase,

enlightenment through productivity. The ecstatic is unearned, and thus feared.”

The result is a neurocultural paradox: a society addicted to stimulation, but allerg... See more

Dr. River Blaine puts it bluntly:

“Modernity declared war on ecstasis. It replaced waves with algorithms, breath with

metrics, awe with optimization. But the body remembers. The psyche remembers. The

ocean waits.”

To be stoked is not

simply to be excited. It is to be lit up by the world. It is a state of affective enthrallment, a

sensuous cascade of perceptual immediacy—a full-bodied yes to the present tense.

Dr. Cardona writes:

“We live under the dominion of what I call Cognitive Calvinism: the belief that pleasure

must be earned through suffering, that joy is suspicious, and that altered perception is a

moral threat. The stoked/stoned state is not pathological—it is revolutionary.”