Once we realize the extraordinary power we have to compose our lives, well move from passive, conditioned thinking to being co-creators of our fate.
Everything that we design is designing us back
To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.
Ideas are powerful because they allow us to see the world as it could be, rather than what it is.
Imagination allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.
Mindgasm (noun) - An exhilarating neurostorm of intense intellectual pleasure. Fully revelatory understanding of a certain topic. Involuntary contractions of brain muscles usually accompanied by the overwhelming sensation of truth proximity. Visionarism. State of awe.
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.
I do NOT accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it FOREVER! Or at least I'm going to try.
Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the adjacent possible. We didnt stay in the caves. We didnt stay on the planet, and soon we wont stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet.
For me, its always a failure of the imagination. I have that anxiety that time is passing, that everything is ultimately fleeting and impermanent. I better take advantage of every single moment.
Consciousness, when its unburdened by the body, is something thats ecstatic; we use the mind to watch the mind, and thats the meta-nature of our consciousness; we know that we know that we know, and thats such a delicious feeling, but when its unburdened by biology and entropy, it becomes more than delicious: it becomes magical.
There's always going to be the circumstances you can't plan for. There's always the unexpected relevance and the serendipity.
I think in a way, what it is to be human is to transcend our boundaries. That is the human story.
Awe is the best drug in the world
I think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it...forever. Or at least I'm going to try.'
We are the naked monkey that went to the moon. People seem to forget that.
Cinema is a technologically mediated dreamspace, a way to access, a portal to the numinous that unfolded in the fourth dimension, so cinema became sort of a waking dream where we can travel in space and time, where we can travel in mind. This became more than virtual reality, this became a real virtuality.
Death is not necessarily what gives meaning to life LIFE gives meaning to life, and what we do with life, which is to create knowledge like music, art, science To this end, I believe intelligent life might be evolution's secret weapon: the ultimate hack that might help us transcend entropy.
Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.
As technology continues to increase our possibilities, what we're seeing is a shrinking of the lag time between what we dream about and what we create.
There is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them.
That's the case with these exponential technologies; our brains, they struggle with it. We live in a world that is global and exponential, and our brains evolved in a world that was linear and local.
We have always dovetailed our cognition to our tools, but when our tools start dovetailing back, where do I end and where does the tool begin? It is going to be a really Twilight Zonish situation. It is definitely interesting. Once Google is in a blood cell sized device in our brain, do we become part Google? There are certainly interesting things to think about and provocative questions, but I don't think those provocative questions are going to do anything to slow down the onset of these technologies arriving and becoming even more pervasive.
Alistair Crowley used to define magic as anything in which you can exercise your will in the world through the use of your mind. So what's the magical way of opening or closing that door? Well, to will your body to stand up and close or open that door, that's magic. With the iPhone, it's like you put your intent into it, and it helps you exercise that intent in the world.
We are the Captains of Spaceship Earth...we have the capacity to overcome our limits.
