Sublime

It’s how you look at the world—it’s not that the things themselves are sublime, but our brain and our consciousness are aware of them. A lot of it involves walking around and looking at things as they are, divorced from the words we associate with them.

If you look at a tree and don’t think of the word “tree,” you see this giant thing springing up... See more

If an asteroid hadn’t struck Earth at the exact angle it did 60 million years ago, dinosaurs would still be here. Because of that cataclysm, mammals could evolve and become dominant. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be talking to you; there would be pterodactyls in the sky. We live in a world suffused with this knowledge, yet it’s not affecting... See more

SA: I can imagine two possible futures. In one, we become more machine-like, and this “god” we’ve created simply raises expectations—making us busier and more disconnected from the sublime. In another, if people have the kind of intellectual freedom you have, AI could actually help them think more deeply and access that part of themselves. It feels... See more

My major in college was Classics, probably the least practical major you can have. I remember a crash course in Ancient Greek where we had to translate a paragraph by Thucydides. It took me a day and a half to translate that one paragraph. It was so frustrating; it drove me crazy. But it made me think. It made me develop patience. It made me... See more

the human brain is the most sublime organ of all. It’s more sublime than AI or the internet. Those things are simply reflections of the human brain. Our complexity is through the roof. Some neuroscientists have said nothing in the universe comes close to the complexity of the brain—the neurons, the connectivity, the infinite connections that can be... See more

Technology had the potential to be absolutely sublime. If you think about the internet itself, it is a completely sublime object. Look at Wikipedia—it’s sometimes inaccurate, but thousands of people are working on the same thing and discovering it together. It’s mind-blowing. The sublime, in the original concept, includes what Immanuel Kant called... See more

SA: It seems to me you don’t see exercising agency, having insane mastery over something—and dissolving the ego as contradictory things.

RG: Very much so. My fourth book was on mastery. The sixth chapter covers people who have mastered something on such a high level—usually music, the arts, or science—that it’s inside of them. It’s a mixing of the... See more

SA: I have tasted transcendence through psychedelics and they’ve been very transformative experiences. But then the next day, there are still crying babies, payroll, and spreadsheets. We live inside a system. Can we simultaneously inhabit the mysticism and the spreadsheet? Is that the goal? I guess what I’m asking is: why is it so hard to integrate... See more

Social media is just a cesspool of those very petty things. I’m not saying it’s all that way—I have a meditation app on my phone that I love, but social media is mostly a cesspool of banality as opposed to these cosmic things. We’re conscious creatures, and we’re conscious for a reason. It’s a freak occurrence. I don’t even know if there’s anything... See more