Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
AWE : an experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental
models of the world to assimilate it. So I think a lot about the contrast between
banality and wonder, between disengagement and radiant ecstasy, between being unaffected
by the here and now, and being absolutely ravished emotionally by it.
And I think one of the problems for human beings is mental habits.
Once we create a comfort zone, we rarely step outside of that comfort zone.
But the consequences of that is a phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation.
Over stimulation to the same kind of thing, the same stimuli again and again renders said
stimuli invisible. Your brain has already mapped it in its own
head and you no longer litteraly have to be engaged by that.
We have eyes, yet see not. Hears that hear not.
And hearts that neither feel nor understand. There's a great book called "the wondering
brain". It says that one of the ways that we elicit
wonder is by scrambling the self temporarily so that the world can seep in.
Grass when given proper attention becomes an infinitly magnificent world in itself.
You know, Darwin said : "ATTENTION, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this
into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement."
That's what rapture is, that's what illumination is, that's what the infinite comprehending
awe that human beings love so much is. And so, how we do that?
How do we mess with our perceptual apparatus in order to have the kind of emotional and
aesthetic experience from life that we render most meaningful.
Because we all know those moments are there, those are the moments that will make final
cut. Only in these moments, we experience afresh
the hardly bearable ecstasy of direct energy exploding on our nerve endings.
This is the rhapsodic, ecstatic, thrusting force of awe that expands our perceptual parameters
beyond all previous limits. We literally have to reconfigure our mental
models of the world in order to assimilate the beauty of that download.
That's what it means to be INSPIRED. The greek root of the term means to breath
in! To take in !
We fit the universe through our brains and it comes out in the form of nothing less than
poetry. We have a responsibility to AWE.