JASON SILVA: You know, I'm somebody
that's a real big hoarder of quotes and ideas.
Whenever I stumble upon something
that's exquisitely well written, I
long to capture it, to clothe it, to transcribe it,
to basically record it.
There is a manic desire to capture
the reverberation of something magnificent, of something
beautiful.
And so there's all these lines that I
have in my head that seem to apply to almost every moment
of contemplative exactitude.
One of them, of course, is, I look upon this horizon
and I think to myself, and all the clocks in the city
began to whir and chime.
Oh, let not time deceive you.
You cannot conquer time.
In headaches and in worries vaguely life leaks away.
And time will have its fancy tomorrow, or today.
So that's kind of depressing, right?
That's about dread.
That's about time passing, no matter what.
But then there's other lines.
Other lines that inspire me.
One of those lines, for example, could be something like,
to see the world in a grain of sand,
and the heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
hold eternity in an hour.
All of a sudden, everything is radiant.
Everything is resplendent.
Everything is beautiful, again, right?
It's like when Henry Miller says,
even a blade of grass when given proper attention becomes
a magnificent thing in itself.
So what does that tell us?
That something as mundane as grass can be exquisite.
That something as dull as the every day
can become magnificent, resplendent, miraculous,
divine.
Only if we're able to tweak our perceptions, to shift
our perception, through the arresting
and modulation of attention.
That's why cinema, that's why poetry, that's why art,
arrests the body mind and thrusts it
towards the numinous.
And that's such an important thing.
And all of a sudden we become like Dylan Thomas.
And we feel inspired.
And we say, I love this moment so much.
I will not go gently into that goodnight.
I will rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I will practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
Because minds are like parachutes and they only
function when open.
And Timothy Leary was right.
In order to use your head, you've
got to go out of your mind.
It's amazing how the self is mediated by the ideas
that it is exposed to.
My very personality, my very quest,
is shaped and authored by the bumper stickers,
by the words of wisdom, that I stumble upon along the way.
Think about that for a minute.
There's a documentary I saw once,
it was called "In Search of the Miraculous."
And isn't that the search?
I mean isn't the search for the divine, for the miraculous,
for the inconceivably sublime, what life is all about?
Isn't that what Joseph Campbell talked about when he talked
about the hero's journey?
And apotheosis, and rebirth, and resurrection, right?
Holy moments, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum.
And again, it all comes down to controlling and mediating
our attention.
Darwin said it best.
Attention, if sudden and close graduates
into surprise, and this into astonishment, and this
into stupefied amazement.
So if you are a wonder junkie, if you believe as Carl Sagan
did that understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
If you are hungry for the sublime,
learn to control your attention.
Learn to control your mind, your thoughts.
Because your creative and linguistic choices,
the very words you use to map your reality,
feed back into your reality.
You are the painting.
You are the paintbrush. s You are the canvas.
You are the question.
You are the answer to the question you are looking for.
You are, also my friends, the question.
You are everything.
We are everything.
We are sentient.
We are consciousness.
The most sublime, miraculous thing in the universe.
So you'd better be having a good time and authoring your fate.
Turn your life into a living, breathing, work of art,
because anything less would be a tragedy.