[MUSIC PLAYING]
All right, so the idea is to believe
in a more brilliant world.
Of course, this requires a childlike state of wonder.
As Alan Harrington wrote in The Immortalist,
we must all remain uncompromising child voyagers--
retain a child's eye view of what might be.
What happens with adults is that we
become jaded-- the been theres and done
thats of the adult mind.
It's a form of laziness.
It's a form of dispensing with the here and now
and jumping to the conclusions.
It's a sort of impatience with lived life
that we need to transcend.
We need to re-engage with the senses.
We need awaken the mind's attention
from the lethargy of custom and the film of familiarity,
and redirecting it instead to the wonders of existence.
Absolute unmixed attention is a form of prayer.
Looking begins with love.
Love begins with looking.
This is the eye of the child.
This is the mind of the child.
We're all born artists.
We're all born ecstasy seekers.
And then it just gets pummeled out of us.
It gets stripped away by banality.
What is banality and boredom, if not defences the educated mind,
employs against experience so that it's not continually
exhaustingly astonished, as Michael Pollan wrote
in The Botany of Desire?
And it's true, it would be astonishing to be open to it
all at any given time.
Just read James Joyce.
But we must, nonetheless, strive to reenter these spaces,
because these are the only spaces that have ever
led to visions that have transformed the world.
That, my friends, is that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]