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What Jason Silva's "Daily Grail" Interview Tells Us about Drugs, the Sublime, and the Quest for Meaning

6/9/2018

28 Comments

 
​Since this is apparently the week of mystical thinking, and my week of upsetting the rich, powerful, or famous, I figured that I should finish up by discussing the strange interview with television personality Jason Silva, best known from NatGeo’s Brain Games, that ran in the Daily Grail earlier this week. While not exactly interesting in and of itself, except as a portrait of a hyperverbal person talking faster than he thinks, it speaks to what I think is the grander underlying theme that is driving so much of the conversation around the fringes of science. Sadly, it’s the same theme that has circled science for a century: the quest to replace religion with something—anything—that might restore some magic and enchantment to the world. Sometimes I find that as I write about a subject, my views change. This was a case where I started out amused and ended up kind of angry.
​Silva, 36, is a Venezuelan-American TV host, internet video producer, and lecture circuit speaker. He describes himself as a futurist, and he lectures about science and technology. I’ve watched him on TV since he started with Al Gore’s now-defunct Current channel when we were both very young. He’s an engaging TV presence, and I have enjoyed his shows in the past. He focuses his work on what he says is science and philosophy. But in reality, that is a cover for his actual interest. He terms it “awe,” by which he means a sort of mystical experience of wonder and majesty. Those with a philosophical bent will recognize this as the Sublime, which has a long philosophical history that Silva tends to approach at angles, and somewhat unsystematically. “The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity,” Edmund Burke wrote in his famous essay On the Sublime and Beautiful, which explains why it is such a great fit for television and YouTube.
 
Let’s begin by getting the most unsurprising issue out of the way first. I had long thought that Silva had a bit of the stoner’s lilt to his voice, and in the interview with the Grail, he confirms that he gets high, usually on marijuana, in order to experience the sublime. Carl Sagan did the same thing, but in Silva’s case, he seems to be pursuing the sublime for emotional satisfaction, much the way Graham Hancock claimed that his use of drugs let him communicate with the spirit world. But don’t take my word for it. He says it himself: “Why it matters, is intimately connected to the emotional experience that I’m having, as I make sense of this idea in the moment, right? And so, that’s where the, you might call it the ‘hypomania’ comes from– The anxiety and the impulse to transcribe and record and immortalize and eternalize and clothe in language these epiphanies.” Language he has in spades. Editing, however…
 
He name-checks Terrence McKenna and compares his own work to that of the Romantic poets. He says that when he is filming, he induces (he does not say how) an altered state of consciousness, to the point that he does not recognize the “him” that appears on camera. “I first had to cultivate a way of getting out of my own way,” he says. “I had to find a way how to talk about these ideas without being self-conscious about the fact that I’m talking about these ideas and thinking about how I’m coming across on camera for fucking chrissakes. Then I had to figure out how to induce a reverie.”
 
I will concede that I have a little bit of a problem trying to square his claim to be pursuing “awe” in an unmitigated “frenzy” with his description of the process as a desire to “make content,” specifically the YouTube videos he produces for Discovery Networks, the parent of the Discovery Channel. He describes at length his pursuit of wonder as mediated through a variety of, well, media—through lenses of cameras, though social media, even through random collections of inspirational quotes. “I concoct a world that’s built around my needs for being able to output at that level,” he says. The most generous reading is that he wants to share his enthusiasm for the sublime with a mass audience, but how much of the sublime do you actually experience when filtering it through a calibrated media strategy to maximize your social media footprint and deliver optimized content on a fixed schedule?  
 
All of these threads are present in what I consider the most telling, and also the most verbally incoherent, of Silva’s unscripted remarks. I will have to condense them because his meandering comments take up too much space. The highlights compare cannabis to a sexual lubricant and suggest that getting high is like giving your brain an orgasm that, perversely, returns you to childhood innocence—and it’s all great for the business of selling people on your “content”:
You want uninterrupted play. Which means baseline reality, the reality of adults, the reality of rules, the reality of consensus needs to be outside the container you’ve created.  Where do little kids play? In the yard.  On the beach in a container set up by the parents where they can be free, in the playground… What’s the playground for adults? Vegas, if you like alcohol but that’s not really my cup of tea.  So what’s my playground?  Maybe I’m in a castle in Edinburgh, stoned with Jason Goodman– But if there’s annoying tourists around then it’s no longer my playground.  So why a place like Amsterdam? Number one: The modality of transportation for the entire city is the bicycle. […] And I don’t see signs anywhere that say ‘No biking allowed. Dismount!’. I don’t feel the matrix of rules being imposed, so the feeling of freedom is ever-present, the landscape is magical-mystical-fairytale-like. Cannabis is legal or tolerated, which means you can also add what they call ‘cognitive astro-glide’.  Because you’re already in a liminal landscape you’re already riding your bike with your friend, you’re already absent of any rules telling you that you can’t play here, so the mood is already geared towards play.
 
Then you add a little ‘cognitive astro-glide’ and then you’re off to the races. You’re on your bike, you get in the zone and say ‘Let’s stop over here’. You sit at a bench in the park and start filming [and] you feel like you’re in this kind of rendered video game-like virtual environment VR; It’s a VR world called the Netherlands and I’m inside it but not of it. And so, I can function and unfold in parallel, so the whole thing becomes the playground for my deep play- And that’s why I like to shoot in places like that.  And I’ll take a guy like [videographer] Jason Goodman and go for two weeks and come back with fifteen videos.
​I will admit to being a bit charmed that the Grail interviewer, Grant Calof, in transcribing this almost incoherent response, was apparently unaware of what Astroglide is and didn’t recognize it as the brand name of, shall we say, a type of personal lubricant. I also admit to finding Silva’s lazily meandering syntax running curlicue around fossilized fragments of corporate Newspeak and random science and technology terms to be infuriating. I’ve never before said that someone speaking extemporaneously needed an editor, but … did he do this interview high?
 
But at a deeper level, look at what Silva is really saying. He, like Mitch Horowitz and Gary Lachman and the ancient astronaut theorists and Graham Hancock and all the other operators on the fringes of science and belief, wants to be free from the strictures of science and society, to imagine a world pregnant with magic and retreat into the fantasia of childhood. It is a depressingly familiar refrain. I am reminded of Lovecraft’s words in “The Whisperer in Darkness”: “To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity!” When he wrote those words in 1930, he was reflecting what Max Weber called the drive to reenchant a world that science and capitalism had ground into quotidian boredom. Nine decades later, we are still there.
 
And that’s what gets me. The people who tell their audiences that they are acting in the name of science (rightly or wrongly) eventually reveal themselves to be on a spiritual quest in search of the Sublime. They want to touch the divine, and to find in wonder and terror the fingerprints of the gods. I will concede, though, to finding myself surprised that most of these speculators identify the best ways to transcend mundane reality for the Sublime is through spending lots of money on experiences that everyday working people might need a lifetime to afford. Many seem to believe that personal self-indulgence, taking plenty of free time to engage in fantasy away from workaday responsibility, is the best path to spiritual rapture. It must be nice to either be rich enough to take weeks or months to go play somewhere exotic or to have a powerful corporation willing to pay for your vacations and altered states of consciousness. But it’s really just spiritual wish-fulfillment for their paying audiences, not unlike watching couples buy unaffordable McMansions on HGTV, or watching chefs cook $500 dinners on Food Network. It’s a beautiful dream, but one that very few will ever experience as anything but a dream.
 
There’s nothing wrong with searching for the Sublime or experiencing the joy of awe. But I’d like to see the seekers have the courage of their convictions and admit to what they’re really looking for. Silva alleges on his webpage, for example, that the search for awe has anti-inflammatory properties (that’s probably just the pot) and produces a measurable return on investment for workers and businesses in terms of enhanced productivity. Wrapping the spiritual in the clothing of science to cater to the prejudices of capitalism cheapens the whole experience and adds a layer of cynicism that gives a depressingly modern American veneer to an age-old desire.
28 Comments
Joe Scales
6/9/2018 10:26:53 am

"... and my week of upsetting the rich, powerful, or famous..."

Still with the wishful thinking experiment thing?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
6/9/2018 10:52:52 am

Most everyone I write about is richer, more powerful, or more famous than I. And they are usually upset.

Reply
Joe Scales
6/10/2018 11:31:02 am

You see then? It must be working!

Bezalel
6/9/2018 12:11:25 pm

Best way to piss off the rich and powerful is to implement some liberal democratic ideals.

Just watch the conniptions and the rage drip from their stammering lips

Reply
Huh? What?
6/9/2018 01:39:58 pm

Hebephrenia says what?

V
6/9/2018 12:22:16 pm

I actually find myself saddened by people who need drugs and wild travels to find a sense of wonder. Now, I'm a person who is fairly widely traveled, for an "everyday person," at least within the continental US. (I've been to Canada and to England, but other than that, within the US, because driving.) My most awe-inspiring moments have been things like...driving to my aunt's house less than an hour away, and coming around a corner and driving into the perfect set of conditions to be INSIDE a rainbow. Yeah, sure, science can tell me that I wasn't "inside" a rainbow, that it was the angle of the light and the refraction of the mist around me, but there were colors EVERYWHERE, and it was AMAZING. Things like....walking outside after an ice blizzard left my entire area coated in half an inch of ice. It was like walking into a fairytale forest where the trees were made of diamonds!

Wonder and awe and the sublime are all about how you see the world, and no amount of travel or drugs is going to find it in distant places if you don't know how to find it in the first place. And saying that you NEED the drugs to find it isn't indicating a key to happiness, it's indicating you need to get yourself checked into a rehab facility, because you have an addiction.

Reply
Not the Comte de Saint Germain
6/9/2018 12:39:45 pm

I'm having difficulty expressing how enthusiastically I endorse this comment.

Reply
Americanegro
6/9/2018 01:42:25 pm

Wait, what? YOU'VE BEEN TO YOUR OWN COUNTRY?

Reply
V
6/9/2018 10:08:28 pm

Chunks of it, anyway. All up and down the East Coast, southern California, and the deserts of the Southwest. The Grand Canyon was far more...I can't resist...sublime than I expected it to be. (Seriously, though, WOW. Pictures do not remotely do it justice.) There's still plenty for me to explore and enjoy, and plenty of amazing and incredible experiences to have.

Clete
6/9/2018 04:10:26 pm

I agree with your post. I can remember going grocery shopping one night and seeing a full moon just over the mountains. It was awe inspiring and I got out of my car and looked at it for maybe five minutes or more, time seemed no have no meaning. Someone happened by and asked what I was looking at, so I told him, adding the phrase "Beautiful, isn't it". He took, I assume, a quick glance, answered "Yeah" then hurried off, after all, what he needed to purchase probably wasn't going to be there five or ten minutes later.

Reply
Americanegro
6/9/2018 06:10:02 pm

Wait, what? YOU LOOKED AT THE SKY?

Clete
6/9/2018 09:12:06 pm

Yes, I did. What do you look at? Or do you go through life with your head in your ass.

Americanegro
6/10/2018 06:17:11 pm

No, your mom's. Tasty!

Machala
6/9/2018 12:37:09 pm

When we are young, our creative spirits tend to gravitate to the romanticism of the mystical and occult, leading us in unconventional directions, the better to expand our minds and create a reality from our dreams.
There's nothing wrong about being a young and restless soul. It is from that sometimes quixotic search, true genius expresses itself. The use of cannabis, or other personality and mind altering substances, is also part of the process of discovery for many young adventurists.
For many of us, in the twilight years of our quest, we look back on our own youthful forays into the mystical world, somewhat chagrined at our own hubris, and somewhat resentful that the REAL world intruded into our fantasies. We've grown up, grown old and grown cynical but must not become the argument of our own scorn by forgetting that we were once - and to some degree, still are - likewise searching to replace the depressive and repressive reality of our existing world.

Jason Silva is a very creative young man who is momentarily stuck in the netherworld between the visions of romantic youth and the desire to express himself artistically in an "adult" world. I don't begrudge him or fault him for that. Like everyone else, it's a learning curve.
As many of us old Dons would say: " Been there, done that, and got the scars and tee shirt to prove it !"

Reply
Americanegro
6/9/2018 01:45:51 pm

I love marijuana and Amsterdam is nice but not heaven on earth. Pot smokers are like cops: the bad ones ruin it for the remaining five percent.

Reply
Greg
6/12/2018 01:04:11 pm

I could not agree with this more.

Shane Sullivan
6/9/2018 02:45:51 pm

Commodification of the numinous is a pretty common attitude in the West (the whole world?) right now. Sure, it doesn't make life spiritual, it just makes spirituality tawdry; but apparently tawdry pop spirituality (and even less) is enough for many people.

Reply
Americanegro
6/9/2018 03:57:07 pm

I'm SO glad that we're better than them and most people in the West (the whole world?), right now.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
6/9/2018 06:41:19 pm

Okay, fair enough, I managed to sound elitist while somehow contributing nothing to the conversation. Point taken. Let me flesh out my point a little.

Deepak Chopra (or any other Oprah Book Club guru-of-the-month) is vapid at best, a dangerous source of misinformation at worst. It's also a popular activity among Silicon Valley executives to go to the Zendo and stare at a wall for 45 minutes in between hostile takeovers. Even though the former is a walking platitude factory trying to make money by telling middle-class and poor people what they want to hear, and the latter sounds like a great way to be okay with/get better at shallow materialism and unethical business behavior while pretending "don't be evil" actually means anything, if people are somehow comforted by these things, then, without condoning, I won't condemn.

BigNick
6/9/2018 11:31:00 pm

"Okay, fair enough, I managed to sound elitist while somehow contributing nothing to the conversation. Point taken. Let me flesh out my point a little."

You dont have to explain yourself to AMERICANEGRO for acting like AMERICANEGRO

Let the seed rule
6/10/2018 06:10:39 am

Without drugs there would be no 10 Commandments, no Law, no Civilization.

Reply
Doc Rock
6/10/2018 06:01:23 pm

Dealing in science and reality is often hard and time consuming. Why spend years earning advanced degrees and conducting research on various mysteries when you can take a short cut and pronounce that some stone temple or pyramid or statue was made by aliens or supernatural beings because people of the past weren't bright enough to carve and raise really big rocks?

But then again, as someone who has spent a fair amount of time sinking test units in 90+ degrees weather I could see the allure of sitting in air conditioned comfort and spinning wild theories about the past rather than doing the grunt work to actually investigate it.

Reply
Americanegro
6/10/2018 09:50:27 pm

Wait, now you're complaining about SUMMER? No wonder you're an alcoholic.

Reply
Sharon Hill link
6/10/2018 09:16:31 pm

I call them Scientifical Americans.

Reply
An Anonymous Nerd
6/12/2018 06:22:32 pm

Unclear antecedents are not your friend.

-An Anonymous Nerd

Reply
Brian
6/11/2018 02:43:04 pm

That this world isn't full enough of wonder to satisfy anyone is beyond my comprehension. Those who understand quantum physics, can explain the properties of water, can give the scientific names of every living thing on the planet, and can perfectly predict what any human being will do next can claim the right to be bored with the world as it is. Anyone else is a ditz or a con or a nit who's watched too much television. Get up off your asses and take a walk outside! Look in another person's face, not at a screen! Pet a dog! If you aren't filled with wonder and awe within 12 minutes, you're not paying attention.

To have to believe in made-up crap to feel awed, or worse, to have to smoke shit to feel awed, is the saddest thing I've ever heard.

Reply
Machala
6/12/2018 01:42:09 pm

Unfortunately, Brian, there's an awful lot of sad people in this world, who believe they need soporifics and/or stimulants to feel awed.

I'm not, by any definition, a religious person and I certainly don't believe in God in a biblical sense, but I start every morning, by looking out at the world and remembering this biblical quote: " This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice in it and be glad ! "

Reply
V
6/13/2018 01:55:14 pm

The funny part is, "those who understand quantum physics, can explain the properties of water, can give the scientific names of every living thing on the planet, and can perfectly predict what any human being will do next" tend to instead express a greater sense of wonder than those who can't...

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