humans are social animals, and we try to keep ourselves inside a kind of circle and mentally inhabit an enclosed space.

well, the sublime is what lies just outside that circle. other ideas about the world. other ways of thinking, other ways of feeling. and it’s transformative.

because humans don't naturally like limits. when your mother tells you, don't do that, that's exactly what you want to do.

the word sublime, from the Latin means up to the threshold. up to the threshold of a door. and looking through that door on the other side is a sublime experience. so when you take a hike and you're feeling like a sense of awe at everything that you're seeing, and you're feeling your heart beating and you're feeling this rush of adrenaline, you're so excited, you're experiencing a sublime emotion. and that sublime emotion is a kind of an expansiveness as opposed to the closed spirit that we normally have.

and it's liberating and it's exciting.

we create our own reality. we have imaginations. we can imagine new kinds of political structures. we can imagine new kinds of social ways of interacting. we can create instead of just passively consuming what other people give us.