The artist has a compulsive need to pay tribute to what he has experienced, not only in order to share it with others, but also in order to fully reflect and bring into awareness the weight and depth of the emotional experience for himself or herself — the level of which might be bubbling just beneath the surface of his awareness. The ecstatic surrender, the aesthetic arrest, the rapturous awe, is felt, and upon returning to ordinary consciousness, the residual feeling compels one to honor it in words.

This relentless urge becomes what fuels many of us: The Imaginary Foundation says that to “imbue our artistic work with even a twinkle of that reverence,” (felt during the ecstatic moment), is enough to give our lives purpose.

I believe one must be willing to explore oneself while in the ecstatic state, to maintain enough executive function to describe vividly what is felt so deeply.

One must be willing to record oneself having idea sex in real time — we’re talking about recording the bursting forth of Aha.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote,

“The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and bone.” He argued that the primary vehicle for increasing complexity consciousness among living organisms was the nervous system. It is our responsibility to put it to good use!

An article in Wired said this:

“Teilhard went on to argue that there have been three major phases in the evolutionary process. The first significant phase started when life was born from the development of the biosphere. The second began at the end of the Tertiary period, when humans emerged along with self-reflective thinking. And once thinking humans began communicating around the world, along came the third phase. This was Teilhard’s “thinking layer” of the biosphere, called the noosphere (from the Greek noo, for mind). Though small and scattered at first, the noosphere has continued to grow over time, particularly during the age of electronics. Teilhard described the noosphere on Earth as a crystallization: ‘A glow rippled outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever-widening circles,’ he wrote,’till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.'”

The Imaginary Foundation says that “To Understand is To Perceive Patterns”… Rhetoric is the means by which we interpret patterns!

In that spirit, I asked Acceler8or to present these two videos:

Musings on Terrence McKenna’s Emergence of Language from jason silva on Vimeo.

Meeting of the minds with Transcendent Man director Barry Ptolemy from jason silva on Vimeo.