Hear this mad beautiful man talk about beauty, about its power, its glory, its grace. Jason Silva wears his passion on his sleeve, and it pours out of his pores. He says beauty can heal and how we need to seek it out again and again, in music, in art, in landscapes, in poetry, because that is what will cure the pain in our souls and give value to our lives - however small and insignificant we might think it to be.
Jason Silva is a motivational speaker, an Emmy-award winning television host and a filmmaker. He hosts the astonishing YouTube series Shots of Awe, and has given hundreds of lectures on innovation, creativity, technology and relationships. His National Geographic TV show Brain Games is a massive hit and has been broadcasted in over 171 countries.
Hear more of his astonishing videos here.
Note -
I give the transcript of the talk below - but I URGE you to see the video above, because you will not leave unmoved with what and how he says what he does!
How Beauty Can Heal Us
the transcript:
I remember that line by the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. He used to say that life should be lived to the point of tears. Of course he's referring not to unbearable suffering, I think, but rather to aesthetic bereavement - when you're moved by something so beautiful that there's almost a cognitive dissonance between what you're beholding and what you know the average to be.
Alain De Botton famously wrote that the reason beauty can make us sad is because what it hints at is the exception, is because what it hints at is the ideal.
Think about it.
The term, of course, is aesthetic arrest. When you witness an architectural form, a painting, a landscape, a spectrum of colours that burns itself on your iris, you are arrested, your cognitive apparatus is beheld in aesthetic arrest, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote about. There's even a syndrome that can happen in these moments, people can be so overwhelmed, transfigured by beauty, that they can have actual physiological effects like heart palpitations, they can even lose consciousness. We call this Stendhal Syndrome. When religious pilgrims visit the holy land, like Jerusalem, they stand in front of the synagogue, church, or mosque, and before they know it, they're on the floor. Imagine walking into the Sistine Chapel, and looking up at that ceiling.
Beauty is an altered state of consciousness, beauty is an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace - beauty cracks us open. And as Leonard Cohen said - it is through our cracks that light gets in.
So are we all addicted to beauty? Does beauty provide a drug-like high? Do aesthetics matter?
I remember watching Jordan Peterson talking about why you need art in your life. And he cited people in a museum looking at the Renaissance portraitures’ and talking in astonishment at billion dollar art collections and he asked himself "What are they doing? Why does that painting cost a billion dollars? Why are people standing in front of it? They don't know what that means!"
We stand in astonishment, dumbstruck in wonder, when we gaze upon art, because the transcendent, he says, shines through the mattice.
You feel the same thing when you walk into a gothic cathedral. Even the atheists among us are held captive by the light coming in through the stained glass, which is like light going through trees.
Beauty arrests. Because it points to something beyond the everyday, beauty arrests because it hints at a realm of the sacred, beauty arrests because it awakens the religious impulse in us. Beauty can shake us out of our jadedness. There can be no cynicism in response to being overwhelmed by the beatific. Form and function matter.
And so surround yourself with beauty, listen to beautiful music, soundscape your world, curate your environment, choose diligently the people you share time with. As McKenna said "You become what you behold". Introduce some art and beauty into your life. It'll seep into your pores, it'll change what lies within, it'll transform the deepest part of you. Let the music make you cry, gaze upon the fading sunset, weep before the sadness. Let it take over.
Why do we cry when we see something beautiful? Because of the cognitive dissonance that needs to be resolved. The moment of catharsis is the moment of absolution, it's the moment when the wrong becomes right.
So open yourself up to the experience. Awaken yourself to our common ecstasy.
Go chase beauty.
Hear these poems on Beauty from Uncut Poetry Podcast -
How Beauty Can Heal Us