When we grasp how words and concepts map our realities, and we see the recurring patterns across different scales of reality, we glimpse a visceral understanding of the infinite. We become Walter Benjamin’s “enraptured prose-beings.” We experience synesthetic ecstasy. It is what Rich Doyle calls “pilates for the head”—pure, intoxicating, irresistible aesthetic arrest. Filmmaker Werner Herzog has lucidly described this feeling as “ecstatic truth”—- a deeper, interconnecting, transcalar, grasp of something, of everything. He has mocked mere factual truth by saying if facts were that interesting then the phonebook would be the world’s most interesting book. Astronomer Rebecca Elson wrote in her book A Responsibility to Awe, that “Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination” — our imagination is the thread that stitches the narrative. Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer credits marijuana for expanding his perceptions: bq. What I find is that pot puts things together. Pot is marvelous for getting new connections in the brain. It’s divine for that. You think associatively on pot, so you can have real extraordinary thoughts. The Imaginary Foundation credits the power of aesthetics: “Great art expands the way we see—it uplifts the human spirit from the barbaric and thrusts it toward the numinous.” Philosopher and writer Alain DeBotton wrote that the artist is “willing to sacrifice a naive realism in order to achieve realism of a deeper sort, like a poet who, though less factual than a journalist in describing an event, may nevertheless reveal truths about it that find no place in the other’s literal grid.” Terence McKenna used to say, “Find the Others”, and so in experimenting with new forms of idea transmission, we’re learning through sharing the delight of being inspired and wired
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:27:10 +0000
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