Within Reason - #122 Robert Greene - Near-Death Experiences and the Mind Apart From the Brain

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $75 purchase). Robert Greene is an American author of books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written seven international bestsellers, including The 48 Laws of Power. He is working on a book about the concept of the sublime, and speaks today about its relation to near-death experiences, dreaming, consciousness, and religious belief. Buy his books here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. What is the sublime, and why are you currently interested in pursuing it? Well, it's a philosophical concept that has a deep history. It comes originally from an ancient Roman writer of Greek origin named Lumpginus, who kind of wrote the first tract on it called Peri Upsos. He didn't use the word sublime, but the Roman Latin equivalent was something very elevated, very high. And then it got picked up later on, in particular in the 18th century, with Kant and Edmund Burke and other philosophers like that.

And so I've kind of put a new spin on the concept of the sublime, or at least something that's a little bit more about who I am and a little bit more unique to me. But the way I like to envision it is human experience always involves a limit. I like to use a metaphor of a circle and within that circle there are codes and conventions that we humans are supposed to live by that govern our behavior that even govern how we think

and so those codes and conventions might change they're not the same as they were in ancient Egypt but they're always there that's always a limiting factor because that's how we live in a social environment

right we can't do or say anything So there's always these conventions that limit our experience. Sometimes that circle can get very narrow, depending on the culture, which I believe we're living in a cultural moment, where that circle is decreasing by the minute largely from technology and social media. But it can also be personal. It can also be you, yourself, get very tight, and you're very, into your habits, and you get very rigid, and things have to be done a certain way. And the sublime, very simply, is an experience.

that takes you outside that circle. Okay? So it's beyond not only what you behave, but more importantly, how you're supposed to think. People don't realize that your thinking patterns are conditioned by your culture.

We live within a culture just like a fish lives in the ocean. We don't see it, we can't see it from a distance, but it tells us how we think, how we look at the world. So, for example, in the 18th century,

the main metaphor for life was the theater. Life is like a drama, it's a theater, all the world's the stage, et cetera. Now the prevailing metaphor is the computer and algorithms and software. And that totally changes how you think about the world. It's a very rigid convention, okay? And so my book is to break you out of that circle

in a radical way because I hate those kind of limiting factors. And I'm very distressed by how rigid and consistent, and strained people's thinking are these days, right? The kind of idea of a free spirit of being open to all sorts of new ideas and experiences, I think is gradually getting lost. So it's a book that's taking you beyond that circle. There are 12 chapters, and it's to me like a clock,

I mean, that's just how I envisioned it. Each chapter involves something outside that circle until the ultimate one, the 12th chapter, is about death. and I'm taking you outside those limits that I mentioned. You asked me why I'm doing it. I've been interested in this subject. It's excited me even before I was writing these books. I read something, I don't know, maybe in the early 2000s,

that got me very excited about it. I intended to write this book in around 06. I got derailed by other projects. I finished my last book, laws of human nature, and I had a stroke. Two months after I finished it, ironically enough, the chapter that I had just finished was about death. I was writing about the visceral experience of death, and then two months later, I came this close to dying. I mean, literally, I was unconscious if my wife hadn't saved me. If I was driving alone, if they hadn't come, the ambulance,

I wouldn't be here talking to you right now. So the feeling of being in the coma of the death experience, it wasn't, well, we now term a near-death experience, I can't say that, but it came very close to dying. And that put a new whole spin on the concept of the sublime. It gave it much more of a personal kind of crusade for me. And, I mean, I could go into other things about the pain I've had to deal with in being so limited physically

and how this book is kind of saving my spirit and my soul because literally I don't think I would have survived if I had no project if I didn't have something like this to put all my spirit into. I think that one thing that people are definitely beginning to talk about more

in my experience, how we've sort of moved from this hyper-rational moment in culture to beginning to value again the nature of experience and narrative and this kind of stuff, is this idea that there are kinds of knowledge which only come about through experience?

I mean, you just spoke about how nearly dying essentially will motivate you and bring a new urgency to the project, but you also just told me that you had written a chapter about death and you're now working on a chapter. This book you're talking about will come out in like a year's time. Content-wise, in terms of actually what you're saying, not just the motivation for writing about it, but were there any significant changes that came about?

as a result of that experience that sort of had to be because of experience that couldn't have just been the result of an intellectual pursuit. How important was experience in the content of what you're writing? That's a very wonderful question. That's a sublime question. So, you know, when I wrote about it in human nature, I was trying to tell you that our concept of death is abstract, particularly right now in our cultural moment, where you can go years without ever seeing physically death. It has no visceral presence. Whereas 200 years ago,

you know, the food that you eat, you're seeing chickens being cut up, you're seeing animals dying in front of you, you're seeing your family die in your home. Death had a physical presence, which we have lost. It's like a cartoon that you see a Tarantino movie and 18 people are being gunned down in five seconds.

It's like a cartoon. It has no reality. We have no physical connection to death. I wrote that. But the irony is, is that it was still abstract to me. You know, I'm still, you know, it's still a concept that I'm writing about. And now it is not a concept. So when I was in my coma, so right before some strange thoughts are starting to occur to me,

my wife is like trying to get me out to stop the car I was driving at the time I had my stroke. strange things are going on my brain as things are kind of melting and then I wake up after my coma and I feel I had the sensation as if my bones were dissolving as if something I was getting softer inside right like almost like you're in a graveyard and your body's dissolving into the ground and the worms are starting to eat you and so and then I had like a kind of strange taste in my mouth. And there were things that I can't really experience. I can't really verbalize. I'm sorry. And so it made it much more real, much different than the kind of abstract concept, the intellectual concept of writing about it. And so, you know, I could write beforehand about how

death makes you aware of how ephemeral life is and makes you appreciate everything around you but once again it was an intellectual concept now it's a very physical feeling so when i look out the window i know how close i came and how that wouldn't be here right now i would be dead i would be i would be underground the women would be eating me so it's like it's a whole different relationship it's not intellectual right we our culture is so left brain dominated we're so abstract. We're divorced completely from experience, particularly in our virtual world. And I suffered from that myself.

You can't get outside of your cultural moment, right? I had a very abstract existence myself, but this wasn't an abstract experience. And today, every moment that I can't really move, I can't do things, I'm very limited physically, I have to work on myself deeply. And I see people now, I've said this in other podcasts, I see people now, they're walking, their dog, they're jogging, they're laughing, they're doing all these things. And I'm like somebody in the cage in a zoo

watching the animals walk outside that are free. But they don't understand that they have this freedom. And so they're actually more in the prison than I am because they're not aware of what a gift this is. They take it all for granted. Sometimes I think of my neighbor. He's out in the backyard. I hear him clipping things and doing activities back there.

I'm going, I try to put myself in there. I go, God, how happy, how simple everyday life is. What a beautiful thing to be doing. But he doesn't think that way. So it's altered me in a very deep way, which is writing that chapter in the other book didn't really alter me, but the experience has completely altered me.

Yeah, I mean, the other obvious example that springs to mind of this kind of thing happening is when people take psychedelic drugs, which is something you've spoken about as well. But the kind of psychedelic drugs you've taken a bit different to the ones that I have, I mean, you're talking about like picking poisonous hairs off of cactuses and eating these sort of ancient, yeah, these sort of Native American. I've done everything. I've done LSD, I've done ecstasy, I've done mushrooms. I mean, what else is there that I haven't done?

Oh, well, that's a trip too. Iowaska is one that I, that I haven't tried, but would quite like to. And in part, because of this sense in which you come away with experiences that, firstly, you can't quite describe them or verbalize them, but also they do seem to have carried some kind of informational content. It's not just, hey, that was cool. It's like, I feel like I've learned something. And I think it's undeniable.

that with such experiences comes knowledge that can't otherwise be had. It's like the famous Mary's Room thought experiment of the girl who lives in a black and white house and has absolutely all of the information that could possibly ever even in principle be discovered about the color blue and then learns all of this and knows everything about blue. But once she steps outside and sees something blue, the question is, does she then learn something new? It seems like, yes, like experience can carry, you know, an opportunity for learning. And I guess a near-death experience is one of the most powerful that you can have. What experiences?

Near-death experiences. I know you don't describe yours as in the sense of, you know, near-death experiences that people have where they, you know, meet Jesus or whatever, but literally coming close to death is probably the most powerful version of that. But the question that came to mind for me is that you were just defining the sublime. And the reason I open with that is because the new book is going to be called. Is it called Towards the Sublime? Well, originally, but my editor thought that that was too boring a title. And so they wanted something.

So right now it's the law of the sublime, which is fine because there is a law of the sublime, and I'm going to be talking about that in the introduction. And so it's not a stretch, but that's the title right now. Classic, classic editorial issue there. I wonder, having defined the sublime as sort of stepping outside of this circle of usual human activity, sublime usually has really good connotations. If something is sublime, it means it's really great. But that near-death experience sounds, by that definition, pretty sublime as well, right?

No, you see, our language is so degraded right now that you can say my breakfast was sublime, and people will say that. Words have no meaning anymore. It's just absurd. It makes me quite angry, as you can tell. And so the word sublime literally means, from the Latin root, it means up to the threshold. Limnos is the Latin word for threshold of the door. So you're up to the threshold of the door,

and that door is death, and you're peering through it, okay? And so in the Kantian and Burkean versions of the sublime and others from that period, You know, I'd go into the romantic poets, Hegel, et cetera. The sublime is a very, this is mostly conthos, sublime is a very peculiar mix of pain and pleasure. Okay? Normally we think of our emotions as being kind of pure.

I love somebody, I hate somebody, but that's never true. There's always an adulteration. They're always kind of mixed. Okay. But generally, pleasure and joy is here. and pain and suffering is over here. But in the sublime, you're having the two emotions at the same time.

And neurologists have studied this because they're very interested now in concepts like awe and the sublimin and trying to find out what happens in the brain. Two contrary emotions at the same time have a very powerful effect on the human brain. I liken it to a vibratory effect. It's like kind of something is vibrating in the brain.

Your brain is moving from pleasure to pain, pleasure to pain. So to give you an example, a common experience of the sublime is a sense of the cosmos, of how vast things are, of time, time is a human construct, there's no such thing, there's eternity, space doesn't exist, it's just endless, that's a very powerful emotion. But at the same time, it's kind of painful. like my life is so short you know my my 70 80 years is like nothing in the terms of the universe the small little space I occupy in my body is nothing I'm essentially meaningless my life has no meaning because it's so minuscule and your brain is vibrating between pleasure and pain pleasure and pain

and it has a very very powerful experience so to take that word the sublime and just refer to something pleasurable is a complete degradation of the word and of the philosophical concept. Obviously, something like Kant is not going to get absorbed into our culture now. So people aren't going to be thinking of the Kantian supply. I understand that. But the word never was supposed to mean to something fantastic. It always had that. And so Burke, Edmund Burke, your countryman, well, actually he was Irish, I believe.

Well, I'm not Irish, so it counts to you. Oh, yes, of course, with your name. And so he had a really interesting way of putting it. So he thought that horror was a very sublime experience. And he meant like at the time, like Gothic novels, you know, that had elements of horror. So when you're in horror, you feel kind of painful, it's awful, the terrible things are happening. But at the same time, you know that it's not happening to you. You're safe, but you're experiencing it through other people or through other story.

And so you've got that mix of the sense of it's terrifying, but I'm not in it. I feel great. I'm not in that world. I'm safe from it. Or you go on top, you're climbing in the Alps, which was a very typical romantic, sublime experience. you see this incredible landscape right and you see how small you are and how dangerous it can be but while you're sitting there you're not you're not in danger and so those two emotions create a kind of a sublime effect have i answered your question yeah what i wonder is that

it's almost surprising to hear it be a necessary component of the sublime that there's this conflict of emotions, because to me, colloquially, when someone says that's sublime, I think it's a good thing, right? But what I'm wondering is, can there be such an experience? If somebody just has an ecstatic religious experience that is like it sort of pushes them into heaven for 20 seconds, and they come back and they describe it as nothing but brilliant and loving and warm, no negative connotations at all, can that still count as a sublime experience, or does the word just, like, not apply there? Well, I mean, it's getting into semantics here, and it's just a word. I mean, you know, in a word we're trying to describe an experience, and this is the experience

that I'm talking about. But even when you have that blissful 20-second St. Teresa of Avila moment where you're close to God, I read her book, she's somebody I was considering for this book, she definitely has all of this pain, this suffering. The emotion of ecstasy with God is also mixed with the distance you are from it. So you have this great moment that then you come back and you're back into your human body, your limitations, ugly people around you, the whole world.

It's painful. So there's never like an unadulterated, pleasurable, sublime experience in the way I view it. I mean, if life was like an endless drug trip, if I were on LSD 24-7,

maybe as a thought experiment that could be something closer to to what you're saying, and you never have to come back to reality and you live. You know, I'm reading right now because I'm preparing my chapter on death. I'm reading very deeply about the near-death experience, and there's some amazing books about it, particularly by scientists and neurologists, not the kind of cheesy religious stuff written,

but the science stuff is absolutely fascinating. and the brain is this filtering mechanism that's like narrowing down by its nature what we experience because if we were open to everything going on around us we'd be overwhelmed so it's narrowing and constricting and when you take a drug or you have a near-death experience

that filtering mechanism is slowly dissolving it's disappearing and you actually see colors that you never saw it before. You hear music in a different way than you never heard before. All the filters are gone, okay? And so that's sublime,

but then you have to come back. You can't, even Aldous Huxley, you know, you have to come back from the experience and there's pain involved. And also, I'm not the only one to do this, but you can liken the sublime to kind of a mental orgasm.

And the French have an expression for the orgasm called the Petit Mour. The little death, right? And when you orgasm, it's like obviously very pleasurable, but there's almost a sensation of it's too much. It's like you're almost like screaming, like, ah, God, I can't, it's almost painful. But it's not, it's pleasurable, but it's a mix of things, right? You know, it's not pure pleasure. There's almost like a slight tincture of,

This is just overwhelming for me. That, to me, is like the mental experience of the sublime. It's kind of a mental orgasm. Yeah. Yeah, overwhelming is a good word there. I mean, it seems to be something to do with intensity. It's not just pleasure. It's intensity.

And intensity does imply a level of discomfort. Okay, I know that Robert Green doesn't like describing foods as sublime, but I might have to make an exception. If you're anything like me, then getting the right kinds of food in your diet can be quite difficult. especially when you've got to keep on top of all the vitamins and minerals that you need to thrive. For me, when I've needed help with my diet, it's been today's sponsor, Huell, who've come to the rescue. That's H-U-E-L, by the way. Their black edition is a complete meal with 40 grams of protein and minimal prep. In its powdered form, you just shake it up in a shaker like this, and you can take it on the go.

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your time and your money. If I hadn't just been told by Robert Green to not do this, I'd call it sublime. But with that said, back to Robert Green. I think, uh, I think it was Rudolf Otto in Das Hey League, um, which is often translated as the idea of the holy, but his entire project is trying to show that, you know, you can't really conceptualize the holy. So a better translation is just the holy. And he describes it ultimately as Mysterium Tremendom at Fascinans, a mystery which makes you tremble, but at the same time is fascinating and draws you in. And that was his cashing out. The same idea crops up over and over again. And I see what you're saying, which is that if you had that endless LSD trip every day of your life, you'd no longer have anything to compare it to, and then it would just become normal.

There'd be nothing to cool sublime because of your experience of the normal, which is fascinating. And also, you're so right that the science of what goes on in the brain when we're talking about these experiences is incredible. Aldous Huxley, when he had his psychedelic experience, came to the realization that his mind had been opened. And what that meant was that usually there was something closing his mind. What was the word that he used? He had an expression for that something mind. I can't remember, but I know, I'll find out, I'll see if I can look it up, but... The larger mind, the greater mind, you get a word for it.

I mean, the idea that blows my mind, if you will, is that, you know, if your mind is open by a psychedelic experience, and that means it's sort of normally being closed by something, well, what's it being closed by? It's being closed by the brain. The brain is a tool for focusing the mind, as Aldous Huckley said. And the really interesting thing to me is the brain research, where you can stick somebody who's undergoing a psychedelic experience in an MRI scanner, and you would expect that their mental activity, their measured mental activity when they take psychedelics would skyrocket. But actually, the mental activity goes down, and that's what allows people to have the psychedelic experiences, implying that the brain is doing more to restrict experience than to produce it. that surely that raises some profound questions about the nature of what the mind actually is if it's not just being like produced by the brain if the brain is a sort of controlling factor

on the mind what is the mind like what do you think is going on there well uh it's a question that nobody is solved and i doubt anybody can ever solve because it's our consciousness we have no distance from it and even in physics they've understood that When you look at something, study something, your mind is actually altering what you study, right? You're aware of that, right? Yeah, yeah. How can you study your own mind? Because as you study your own mind and consciousness, you're altering it, right?

So you can never see it for exactly what it is. But the thing is when I'm reading right now a very interesting book on near-death experiences, it's one of us like the fifth book I've read called After. It's by a psychiatrist, psychologist, the doctor's psychologist. And it was a fascinating book, and he's going into exactly what you're talking about. And so in these near-death experiences, people are literally brain dead. They're literally declared dead. And yet their mind is still going, okay?

And they come back from it, and they describe these experiences. Now, you might poo that and say, oh, that's just irrational. But no, science have demonstrated that they were literally declared dead, their breathing had stopped, their heart had stopped, and he's collected thousands of these stories, so it's not like just one person hallucinating it, and they have common themes. So if your brain is dead, not operating, but your mind is operating, that clearly indicates that the mind is not the brain, right? But what is it? I don't know, he doesn't know, you can't answer that question right now. Maybe someday we'll be able to answer it. But your mind is not your brain. And one thing about this kind of filtering mechanism that fascinated me, a lot of my book has to do with early humans because I believe they were much closer to a lot of these experiences, right?

And I have a chapter on paganism and particularly ancient Greek religion because it's something that I've studied very deeply, but also other religions. And in the pagan world, they were much closer to human consciousness and how weird it is to be a conscious animal, to be hearing voices in your head, be hearing yourselves telling you things.

We take that for granted, but for them, I don't know if you've ever read Julian Jane's book about the bicameral mind. Now, he thought that people thought those were hallucinations. hearing their own thoughts, right? And then when they finally made the connection that those weren't hallucinations,

then Western civilization occurred for the good and for the bad. So they understood that something weird is going on with consciousness, and they were very aware of that filtering mechanism going on. And so a lot of ancient religion involved creating rituals

that completely messed you up. that were like a psychedelic experience in initiation rituals they would literally torture a young man usually it was men boys and put them close to death in very very harsh circumstances

and then pull them out they were like reborn and they had that utterly sublime experience they completely opened up and all those filtering mechanisms dropped out And of course, the use of drugs in the ancient world has now been demonstrated to be extremely widespread. They were using opium. They were using the version of LSD from Brai seeds.

You know, they had hashish, they had all sorts of drugs they were using. Anyway, so that filtering mechanism, you walk around, you're not aware of it. You're not aware of it at all. and this one in the book alive there was this one woman who had a near-death experience she had the most fascinating metaphor she said in your daily life

it's like you're inside of a giant warehouse but all you have is a flashlight or you call it a torch and you able to look at one thing at a time right and what you see oh that's that's a box there that's something there and you're only

to be able to see what your torch will illuminate. Well, when she had her near-death experience, it was that the whole warehouse was lit up. And she was seeing colors that people don't normally see. She was feeling emotions that you normally don't feel. The whole warehouse, everything inside of it was suddenly illuminated,

and she could see reality for what it is, which we don't observe. I'm sorry, I could go on and oner about this, Alex. I've collected so much material. You have to shut me up. some point. No, I hope that you do, because I'm just as interested in this as you are, I think, but not to the extent that I've actually done all of the research that you have. And so it's a great opportunity to dive into some of that. I mean, a few things you said jump out at me.

I mean, one thing is to say, if the research shows that, at least with psychedelics, as the mind opens, the brain activity goes down, the next obvious question is, well, what happens when that brain activity goes down to zero? You know, if the mental activity is going up and if the mind is opening and opening and opening, you know, I'll sort of leave that question open in the air. And I think it's right to remain agnostic. But to say the mind is not the brain is quite a, it's quite a radical position to take in what is otherwise quite a materialistic culture. I mean, the scientific age that we live in has this optimism about the ability to explain everything in terms of atoms that bump into each other. Are you,

of that and if so has that been a result of recent research or has that been something you've sort of always been thinking about well I have a side of me that's very into the materialistic way of looking at things but as you get older you know things shift a little bit but I don't know if this is related to your question but one thing that's been on my mind is the idea of the invisible so we're so as an animal we're caught up in what we can see, right? And that's our whole world. That's our whole reality. But actually, the human experience involves a lot of what is completely invisible. Okay. Are you familiar with the French writer Paul Valerie? Paul Valerie? I don't think so. Maybe. What did he write? He's a fantastic writer. He wrote poetry, but he also wrote these incredible essays. He wrote one novel that's really good. But his essays are what excite me. His poetry is really good as well. he lived in like the 20s and 30s

um anyway he had a concept called um the french word esprit which you know we would just translate a spirit but he takes it to something much bigger and he says that this you could almost like abstract it from an individual and say that the human world is operating under this esprit i mean hegel called it geist so it's similar i suppose in some ways to the hegelian concept But, and so, it's like all of the, if you took all of the human experience of, of like, symbols, so much of our experience involves symbols and analogies, words are symbolic, okay? None of that is actually real or physical. It's simply abstract concepts in our mind we've invented.

So you look at a flag and it has all. all of these emotions and things that ties to it, but it's just a stupid piece of fabric, right? There's nothing to it. We add all of these elements to our world, this invisible thing. Ideas, can you reduce an idea to something material?

Can you like try and go into the brain and see the actual neurons that are being connected that come up with an idea? No, you never will be able to do that. It's an invisible process. Right? And so we're surrounded by things that we can't see. And I have the analogy in my book of you look at the city around you and you just see the buildings, the cars, the people, the technology. But if you had a different sense, you could see the invisible, you could see all of the ideas and the struggles and the mental world that went into creating all of this thing, all of the stuff that's around us. So we're enveloped in the things. Communication between humans is not something, when I tell you something that moves you, that kits you in the gut, and we have this kind of connection like some people who fall in love

have, you can't reduce that to a material thing. The communication between people, what is that? So much of our experience cannot be reduced. It simply cannot be reduced, but we live in a very reductive times where everything has to be reduced to a smaller and small and smaller thing. And to the point where if everything becomes an algorithm, it's not that reality is an algorithm, it's that we've transformed our world into something small and algorithmic. I don't know if that makes sense to you. Because we've already talked about how your brain perceives much less of the world than there actually is.

it sort of focuses the mind, as Huxley would have put it, and if you've decided to focus your mind in a particular interpretation, like an algorithmic interpretation, then that will be the world that you experience, of course. But there is the worry of going wrong in the opposite direction, right, because a moment ago you said, this stuff is really interesting, and I'm not talking about that, like, religious nonsense, because some people look at these near-death experiences and say that, you know, they met Jesus and he told them to come down and, you know, stop masturbating for the rest of their life or something. And what I wonder is when you're looking at this kind of stuff, I've heard some incredible stories of people who have gone to

the brink of death, shook hands with Jesus and come back again. And how do you delineate which stories are serious, which ones aren't, which ones are worth sort of paying attention to? I mean, you must have read about a fair few of them with these four books that you've read so far. Well, I don't know, there's more than that, but I've just pulled that number out there. But, well, an experience is an experience, and if somebody believed they went to heaven, they experienced that. But what this writer of that book that I'm talking about after explains is some of that could be cultural, some of that can be a framework. So you've spent your life as a Christian, for example, and you've heard, let's say you're a deeply Christian, You've heard all about heaven and hell and what heaven is like.

You're going to bring that to the near-death experience, and you're going to see things. And everybody who's had these experiences, and I can say because I had maybe some of it, is you can't verbalize what happened. It's a strange feeling, and you're putting words attached to something that's very hard to verbalize. So they're having this experience that takes them outside of themselves, where all of those filters dissolve, they're seeing things, they're hearing things,

they're experiencing things that are not what they've normally have ever experienced before. They come back to life, and that coming back to life is a very strange experience. Sometimes it's unpleasant because what you tasted was beautiful

and you realize death isn't so bad. Okay, you're now going to interpret it. You have to interpret what happened to you, right? Because that's how the, human brain is we have to enter we have to know we have to see what caused it we can't just live in uncertainty all right well you know jesus white robes angels well that's what i saw now i'm i'm obviously doing what i just said i shouldn't do i'm reducing what they experienced

but that's how he's this this psychologist is interpreting it so we have our own cultural viewpoint our own prejudices our own ideas and when we come back from a near-death experience we're going to be projecting some of that onto it. But the commonalities of seeing something, experiencing something that goes beyond. So there's a book called The Philosophy of Death, which you might find very interesting. That's some very interesting essays on there.

And the opening essay is the one I'm fascinated by the most was by a man who had a near-death experience. he was literally declared dead and so he describes all of these sensations that are kind of similar to a drug-like sensation and I mean I can't remember all of them but it's like you feel yourself becoming one with everything around you

the discriminating mind you know to use the Buddhist concept and everything appears one It's an oceanic sensation. Okay. That is universal in these near-death experiences. Now, you can say that that's, like, religious and hokey, but, you know, screw that kind of thinking.

It's real. It's very real. If thousands of people have reported that, it's real. And I have a story in the book from this woman. Have you ever heard of Jill Boltey-Taylor? I don't think so. okay she's a neuroscientist who in the 90s she was in her late 30s had a very powerful stroke much worse than mine she had what's called a hemorrhagic stroke mine was ischemic one was a blood clot hers was blood flowing

into her brain right very serious and as the blood is flowing into her brain all of those filtering mechanisms are shutting down. And so people don't realize that vision looking is a creation of the brain. The brain filters what we see, right? So the initial, the material comes in, and scientists call that V1. That's the initial sensation. It's just patterns and dots of light, right? That's all we actually really see in V1.

and the brain takes all those dots I'm giving a silly interpretation of it but that's sort of how it's explained and it creates a picture right but it's a picture that we're familiar with because the brain doesn't want to give us things they're going to overload us

she saw V1 her brain was dissolving she saw what it was like the world without it being put into a picture she saw the dots she saw the haziness she felt as she was taking a shower as it was coming onto her that she was literally melting into the shower itself and dissolving away.

This is happening to her, a scientist, right, as she's having a near-death experience, okay? It's the brain, she's literally seeing what happens when the brain is shutting off one part after another, after another, after another. I mean, that's real, that's not, that's not really, that's not Hocum. And she's a scientist and she wrote about it. And I talk about this all the time that these cliches of near-the-experiences, psychedelic experiences, intense meditation experiences, are cliches for a reason. I mean, you might think it's a bit sort of hippie and funky to say, you know, oh, I'm one with everything. But the fact that an idea like that comes up so often everywhere and in such a way that famously can't quite be explained must mean something. And I often tell people that when it comes to drugs in particular, I think like all of the cliches are true.

You know, you take like a sort of low dose of a psychedelic drug and you stare at the sky and you start seeing essentially kaleidoscopic patterns and you go like, oh man, like it really is like that. you know, that's what actually happens. You take a higher dose and you start sort of feeling as though your own sense of self is beginning to dissipate and you're like, oh, man, like, yeah, they weren't kidding when they talked about the ego death. Like, these cliches are true and universal and it's the fact that they are independently experienced by different people, all reporting the same thing, that makes it so scientifically interesting. Yes, well, I mean, I don't know it's related, but Huxley himself, I believe, talked about what he called the Axial Revolution. I think it's the right word, or the axial period.

And basically he was looking at the world like around 4,500 B.C. And all of these ideas in countries that had no communication with each other were occurring at the same time. Like with Buddhism, Buddha is, I don't know what century you actually have. was a fourth century BC, you know, and something, you know, concepts of the oneness of this sort of enlightenment. But then you had ancient Greek writers, the pre-Socratics who were talking about that, like Eryclitis and Empedocles, and then you had Chinese writers talking about the same thing. I could go on and on and on. And I mean, this isn't at the same time, but for this book I've been researching. I'm fascinated with ancient cultures and the fact that they've

disappeared and that they had ways of thinking that are alien to us and I love alien ways of thinking. And so I've been reading a lot about, I focused mostly on Aztec culture because I'm here in Los Angeles, I'm just sort of immersed in Mexican culture. And I've always been fascinated by the Aztecs. They had these same concepts actually in a very strange way and very poetic and beautiful expressions of it. So these are happening all around the world in different cultures that are not contacted with each other. There's something about the universality of it that connects to the human brain.

And we can connect drug experience, near-death experiences, these kind of initiation rituals or some of those sonnas that people would take, you know, with the heat, I forget what they're called, you know, they all lead to the same kind of, or meditation, right? So there's something very real there, and it can't be dismissed as just hokom or hallucinations. Have you come across this concept of the veridical near-death experience? That is, veridical meaning like comporting with the truth. So these are those kind of weird examples where somebody will nearly die and they'll claim to have experienced something which seems inexplicable unless it really happened. So the sort of folklore example is the

person who dies and they sort of see the room. They start like floating above their own body and then they float up and they float above the hospital and they see a red shoe on the on the roof of the hospital. And then they're brought back to life and then they go up and it turns out there is a red shoe up there and there's no way they could have known that. that kind of thing seems to crop up quite a lot. Is that kind of thing, the veridical experience, more on the side of really interesting scientific phenomena at Needs Investigation or the kind of mumbo-jumbo sort of pseudo-spiritual stuff? No. So I said, I refer people to the book that I mentioned after. He describes in several similar ones. And the first one in the book is

something that happened to himself. So he was a young student, an intern at a hospital, and he was having lunch, and he was eating quickly, it was like spaghetti, and some sauce spilled on his tie. As you're reading, and she's going, well, who the, what does this have to do with anything about near-death experience? And then he's called in to investigate a woman who committed suicide. but lived didn't, you know, didn't die. And she described to him how she left the room where she was dead

and she saw all of these things going on. And she was saying, and she mentions how he got the spot on his tie, right? And there was no way, I'm really bungling the actual narration of this, But the idea was there was no possible way for her to have known what cause that he had done this to his tie. You know, and, you know, I suppose you could say, well, maybe she just concluded that from seeing it. The way he describes it, because as I said, I'm not remembering it perfectly is there's no way she could have made that up or just reasoned her way into it. She saw something that happened to him that she couldn't physically have been in the room. Okay.

And he at the time, he was a young man, he was science-oriented, his father was a scientist. You know, this was, what the hell is going on here? And that's made him want to go into the near-death experiences. He compiles hundreds of these experiences where, like, the Red Shoe, which is a classic story, of people seeing things that they couldn't have possibly seen. And sometimes it's debunked where it was made up, but there's so many of them where you can't simply explain where that happened. Now, what is it?

That enters a zone that's almost, I don't think I'm going to explore in the book because it's almost like some of these other things you can kind of explain. You can kind of explain the life review phenomena where very common in near-death experiences, you know, you're falling and you're going to die and your whole life gets reviewed in a matter of 10 seconds but you see everything as if it's passing in hours,

everything that happened to you, the good and the bad and what you shouldn't have done, that is very, very common. That can be explained to some degree. Some of these other things where the brain is shutting it down. But the ability to like teletransport to another room and see something happening that you couldn't have possibly viewed, I have no way of, can you explain that?

I mean, I don't know where to go on that. It's the biggest, it's probably the biggest subject that I most commonly get asked about that I've paid the least attention to, but I would really like to, because that is the question, isn't it? I mean, I'm sure that there are people screaming at their screens about all kinds of explanations for these kinds of things, but I've heard one too many strange stories to just sort of throw it all out altogether. But then I'm also a lot more open than I guess a lot of people at the moment are, at least in the sort of online space that I occupy, to, for example, when it

comes to consciousness, I'm very open to the idea of consciousness being immaterial and weird stuff going on. I like talking about panpsychism, the view that everything is made up of consciousness, including material objects. So my openness to those kinds of ideas means that, yeah, sure, Maybe there's something about the self, which is individualized when we're, you know, human beings walking around. But the self itself, as, you know, as the Upanishads will go on and on about, is supposed to be thought of as unity and unified rather than individualized. And the fact that they were talking about that thousands of years ago, and the fact that that's the same kind of insight that people have today independently when they take psychedelic drug or when they nearly die, it definitely says something. But, I mean, you said that you won't get into the question of what's actually going on there in the sense of trying to explain this phenomena. So where do you take this?

Like, why do you go into this and look at this and bring this up? What's the sort of takeaway for a book like yours? Well, I guess I want to shake people up because I feel like people have become so doctrine, they're so rigid in their thinking. They've become so wedded to a particular metaphor, a particular narrative that has to do with science and computers and algorithms. And they think they're being so rational and realistic, but all they're doing is they're limiting and reducing and reducing experience so that it can be explained with a simple statement.

But that isn't reality. So I want to blast your brains open. I want to give you just this like a fire hose. It's just hitting your brain. You can't possibly think you know what's actually. going on. It's a mystery. We think we're so certain we know what our world is like. We know what's going on around us. We know why we behave this way, who we are, but we don't know any of it. It's just nonsense. We live in this very narrow interpretations. And so the poet Keats, to quote another

countryman of yours, he talked about negative capability, the highest form of of thinking, if you want to be philosophical, where you can have two contrary thoughts at the same time and not be in a rush to resolve it, because there is no resolution. Two contradictory things can exist at the same time, which is a lot about what the sublime is. Okay, the need to be uncertain to know what the world is,

to know what the interpretation is, to have an answer to say, those near-death experiences, they're actually just these things going on in the brain. is you reducing something so that you can explain it because you're so weirded out, you're so anxious about finding explanations that fit into your patterns.

I want to just like take a knife and cut that out of you and make you realize that you don't know what the world, physicists, the smartest people on the planet in that kind of thinking. They've come to the conclusion of how much they don't know of how truly weird when you get down to the subatomic particles

how truly weird it is. We can't explain it. Things are dissolving into other things. There's like a parallel universe perhaps going on. You know, all sorts of things like that. If physicists are blowing our minds, why should we be like reducing everything to like a cliché? And there is this kind of optimism amongst materialists. They sort of say like, yeah, okay, like obviously quantum physics is really weird and we don't know how. happen before the universe began, and we can't explain the fine tuning of the constants, but we've made so much progress that we'll surely get there eventually. It's like, I have no problem saying that we can't explain it yet, but we'll get there. It's this materialistic optimism, which I think is kind of beginning to crack, not just because of the weirdness of some of the things that we're discovering, but also just because of the amount of time that we've adopted this assumption. and science usually assumes materialism methodologically.

So it's like in order to, you know, practice science, we're going to assume materialism. But we've transformed that into a metaphysical assumption, that there really is only the material. And that firstly just completely shuts a door of possible exploration for somebody who is interested in knowing about the world. But also I think it's just deeply unsatisfying for a lot of people after so long. And the one thing I definitely could not dispute is that we are beginning to shift as a culture towards an openness to the sort of non-materiality of explanations for universal phenomena, I think. And so I think I get what you mean. You're trying to open that door for people with a chapter, at least, like this. Well, it's all the chapters.

My wife who's been editing the book, she says reading this book is going to be like a drug experience. Well, I was going to ask, like, what, like, people listening to this will think, okay, cool, I'm so the sublime is, is awesome in the literal sense and near-death experiences off, like, often bring about this feeling of the sublime, but short of just, like, sitting around and waiting until I, like, nearly die, how can I, and we've also just spoken about how it's something that can't really be verbalized or explained. So, you know, how can I, as like a reader who doesn't have that experience, but also knows. that you can't really put it into words. How can I begin interacting with this? Like, what am I supposed to do to open myself up, you know? Well, first of all, the 12 chapters, only one chapter is about death. There are other chapters. I'm running a chapter now about what's called the dynamical sublime,

which is the sublimity of willpower and human energy. I've written chapters about the daemon, the concept of there's a second self within us, which is a very ancient concept. a lot of people are returning to in some ways. I have chapters on our relationship to history, to animals. I call it the interspecies sublime, how we can sort of begin to understand the experiences

and the consciousness of animals and how weird they are. There are animals on our planet that think almost like what we would consider to be alien life forms, such as octopus, such as spiders. Spiders actually think, they actually reason. What is that like? You know, this is where I get a little bit upset with people and their reductionism. The human brain is based on a material thing that has its limitations, right?

If an alien came from another planet, their brain would be, if they had a brain, would notes what they would be because octopuses, they don't really have a central brain. It's located all over their bodies. but let this alien who arrived who maybe has something like that kind of consciousness they're not going to have our concepts our concepts of oh everything is material we're going to reduce it all they're going to have much different concepts so have a little bit of humility in here here you know in business they always have this expression of well this time it will be different meaning this new trend in business that's going to make you millions of dollars

it's different. It's not like the past scams. Well, in science, it's like that as well. Like, we're on the brink of some incredible discovery. But if you go back 100 years, they were saying the same thing, and their discoveries now 100 years later look absolutely absurd. We've gone well beyond them. And I say, in 100 years, the ideas that you formulate now from physics, from economics, people will be laughing at. They'll be laughing their heads up that you actually believe that much like we might laugh at people who believe in heaven and hell right we have no distance from ourselves we have no idea so to get back to my book um i i get a little bit annoyed with how the sublime is treated like an abstract concept so if you read a lot of books on

it they can give you a headache like books by like derida and leotard i'm not degrade denigrating them but they're like, I don't see how that isn't part of my experience. Not that everything has to be experiential, but I can't understand. I can't grasp it. It's too abstract. I wanted to make this sublime something very real. It's an experience that everybody can have, right? And so at the end of each chapter, I have, it sounds kind of banal,

but I have kind of exercises that you can do in your daily life to make you look at the world differently. So in one chapter I talk about how the Aztecs looked at the world, how they saw the sun, how they saw energy, how they saw animals. And I'm actually asking you to go out in the world and try and use that way of thinking in your everyday life. So point by point by point, I'm giving you these little entries to the sublime and your daily experience that you can practice and get to without having to take drugs. You can if you want. I have nothing against it. Without having to have a near-death experience, right? Meditation, which I do every day, a form of Zen meditation,

it leads you to the sublime, very much so. And it doesn't require drugs. It doesn't require death or anything like that. So you have access to it because you have a brain, and because the brain has this potentiality. It's just you're not using it that way. You just said that there's a way, was it the Aztecs, you said they had a way of looking at the world and animals,

which you encourage readers to try out for themselves, walking around. Maybe it's too difficult to do without reciting the whole chapter or something. But I think people will be interested here. Like what kind of practical things can they do? Like, what are you talking about? What's this way of looking at the world? Well, you know, my brain is a little fried right now. So, like, I can't remember everything that I already wrote.

But I remember one thing that I wrote in this chapter, which is the Aztecs had gods for everything. everything, gods and goddesses. And we don't understand this is what I have in my pagan chapter. We think of gods and goddesses. We tend to incarnate them. We tend to have images of them. They're like people.

They're like have these, you know, we can see them. They operate this way. But that's not how pagan people view gods and goddesses. They were energy. They were pure energy. There's the energy of the world around them. And so the Aztecs had this concept of, of a goddess whose name is one of those words you can't pronounce because it's like

T-L-A-Z-C-X you know all that kind of consonants anyway she was the goddess of waste and destruction and detritus everything you want to get rid of and they venerated that right they venerated the waste part that you know defecation the the the things that your body emits when things decay There was a goddess for that. Well, that's a very weird concept, a goddess of decay and waste and putridness, but they saw that as sacred.

And so we have a visceral reaction to that kind of thing that is, that's not sublime. That's just disgusting. But it is sublime. You know, the Zen Buddhists have a quote about shit being sublime, shit being part of their meditation, right? it's all part of our experience it's all part of the world and so in that exercise of how you think

like the Aztecs I want you to see waste and detritus and all that world that we try to avoid that we bury that we don't want to see as actually being kind of sacred that the low is high in a way to reverse your perspective on things I'm not giving justice to how I try to explain in the chapter but that gives you an idea of the Aztec way of looking at. They had other concepts. I have an 800-page book I can show you off my show called Aztec Philosophy. And that title just thrilled me. And it goes very deeply into how they viewed the world

and how they had like three different forms of energy that permeates the universe, a lot of which ended up being very similar to how physicists see the world. so I'll go into some of that as well but that gives you an idea I mean their relationship to the sun for instance we look at the sun we're not even aware of the sun we take it so for granted that there's a star

that is out there it's a star that is going to die at some point that came about because of these weird circumstances for the Aztecs the sun was like this thing that they couldn't understand it was like their whole world they worshipped the sun

but it was more than that. They had to sacrifice and have blood sacrifices of humans to feed the sun, right? Because they felt the sun was dying and would go through these cycles. So the idea that don't take this, just don't look at that thing and ignore it, but think of the strangeness

that there is actually a star out there that is giving us life, that is creating everything for us, and that it was created in some way you know, from gaseous material. I mean, these are some of the ideas of the exercise I give you. I could go on, I've got to shut. Weirdly, the sun and the moon are two things I do this with quite often.

Like, every time I see the moon, and if I ever see the sun in a way I can look at it, like through a really tinted window or something, I really, really try to sort of comprehend the fact that I'm not looking at like an image or so. I'm looking at an actual object, a three-dimensional object that's massive, that is just sort of floating around. I think that the most powerful time this comes out, other people have said this too,

is if you get to witness an eclipse, I saw one once when I was young, and watching the moon travel over the face of the sun slowly, it really just, it realizes the fact that these are these orbs that are actually moving around, because you don't usually perceive the motion. Like if the moon was sort of flying around at a sort of speed, speedy rate, you could see it, you'd really get the feeling like, whoa, you know, we're flinging

around the solar system. And I think that it is worth trying as hard as you can to get into that mode of thinking and realize the reality of what you're actually stood on, which is this huge rock orbiting, orbiting, as you say, a star. It's absolutely incredible. And I think sublime is probably the only word that comes close to describing it. Okay, like one thing I thought about earlier, and this might be a bit of a jarring detour, but it's interesting. And it may be a bit of a naive question, but do you think that dreaming is related to the sublime? Because dreams are one of these other things, which happen sort of almost every night for a lot of people. And we're kind of really used to it, and it's kind of normal, and there's nothing extraordinary about it. But at the

same time, they're one of the weirdest and most extraordinary things that the brain does. Like, do you talk about dreaming? Are you interested in dreaming in this context? I am. I'm revealing my entire book here, But I relate dreaming to the concept of the uncanny, the unheimlich. So the uncanny and the sublime are often related in some ways, right? And the uncanny is a mix of what is familiar and what is repressed at the same time. This is the Freud concept of the uncanny. Okay. So something is uncanny when it seems oddly familiar to a,

it but there's also something very strange about it so the classic example is like of an automaton right a robot that's it looks familiar it looks like a human but it's not human that's very uncanny that's very strange right and so dreams are the ultimate kind of uncanny experience and what i mean by that is if everything in a dream were too familiar if it was just like you know going down the street and having an ice cream it wouldn't be a dream it would have any effect on us but if everything in a dream were so weird we're flying every city etc it wouldn't be able to grab us but what makes dream so compelling is the uncanny the mix of things that are familiar people that we know and yet we are flying and yet we are doing these very strange things that are superhuman

we can't grasp at the same time was familiar not familiar In dreams often, for me personally, dead people will come into my dream. People I know very close to me who died, one of my oldest friends, my father, for instance. They're there. They're alive. And I'm thinking in the dream, wow, he didn't die. He's there with me. I have a dream over and over again.

That is remarkably uncanny because I know that he died, but here he is. He's there. Okay, that's what gives dreams their power. If they had too much fantasy, too much reality, they wouldn't be a dream. And in the context I use that in is to describe why history is sublime. To me, history is like a dream. And what I mean by that is, so I tried to describe in this chapter what the world was like in ancient Babylonia, for instance, did a lot of research on that.

Okay, when you look at a culture, an ancient culture, there's something oddly familiar about it, right? Because they're human. They're going to die. They have to eat. They have pleasures. But there's also something very unfamiliar. They're thinking is so different, it's so odd.

And to have those two things at the same time is what makes history so compelling that I even have a story about 18th century London. If you went back to 18th century London, you would see people doing what we do, going to cafes, drinking, having fun. But their way of thinking, their way of dress, the artificiality of their life is so weird and strange and compelling

that the two of that makes it almost like a dream. So that's where I discuss the dreams because they are sublime in the sense of being uncanny. And so they go back to those mix of emotions. pain and pleasure, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the familiar and the mysterious. Any kind of mix of contrary emotions will generate the sublime. That's a really interesting way of thinking about dreaming, as sort of being in this uncanny valley, so to speak, of familiarity and unfamiliarity. And that's what makes dreams so weird. My favorite example of that is when,

you know, when you are in your dream, you're like, you're in Walmart. Well, you're in Tesco, right? But it's actually like a water park. It's like a water park, but in the logic of your dream, you just know that it's actually Walmart. And it's only after you wake up that you're like, that didn't make any sense. Or you're in your childhood home,

but it's also like, you know, a forest or something. It just sort of makes sense in the dream. That kind of stuff is mind-boggling to me, which is why I just wanted to get a mention in at the end here. But the funny thing is, now I'm thinking about like wrapping up, that there's one other... topic that I think encapsulates the sublime and it's kind of amazing the extent which we've talked about it without at least getting a mention. Having said that, this might be the

reversal of an injustice because usually it dominates conversations about the sublime and it's nice to take a break from that. But of course I'm talking about religion. We just had a whole conversation about the sublime and our interactions with things which sort of take us to the limit of death, take us to the very threshold of our usual human experience. And for most people throughout history, the way that this has cached out is in some kind of religiosity. To what extent does that need to be a part of the conversation? And do you think it's like a bit inappropriate how much the conversation is dominated by this religion idea? No.

You know, what was Terence's expression? Nothing human is alien to me. So all human experience is something that fascinates me, none more so than religion. And I'm not looking at it from a superior point of view. I'm actually looking at from an inferior point of view. When I look at ancient religions in particular, which is my fascination, I'm actually incredibly envious that they're able to look at the world in this way and to experience it that way.

And so there's definitely, when you read the book, you'll see that it's just permeated with things from ancient culture. And I have a chapter on art and aesthetics because art is very much always been connected to the sublime. And I describe what I call in ancient world the primal shock. And the primal shock is the world is what it is. It's so weird, it's so strange. There are plants growing up from the ground.

that these animals that just appeared there's the sun, there's the moon it's shocking how strange it is to be aware of that okay and then that and that's the sacred so that's another concept that I use a lot

that the sacred is the sublime so there was the mix of the sacred and the profane and when you entered the sacred you entered a world of intensity of something heightened and is very much sublime And so that goddess of waste is actually sacred

and it's actually a heightened experience to see waste and detritus that way. But so that primal shock was, it kind of faded a little bit from consciousness. And to get it back, I'm obviously skipping over thousands of years here and reducing it, but to get it back, they had rituals,

initiation rituals. created architecture. They created temples and megaliths and ziggurots, right? They had dramas and theater and sculpture that were kind of creating, recreating that primal shock. Not in as an aesthetic experience as a religious experience. Art and religion were once one. Nobody had a concept of, oh, I'm an artist, right? Art and religion were united. To create art was a religious experience, it was sacred because you were trying to express the inexpressible

in your work and so today in the modern world we still have art aesthetics but the sublime in art is trying to create that religious sense to go back to that shock to recreate that

primal expression people now are so deprived of that kind of largeness of that kind of expansive view, that they're hungry for experience, they're hungry for religion. But they're so turned off by organized religion,

which I generally share as well because it's so cellarotic, it's so rigid, it's so divorced from reality, it's just bullshit, you know, a lot of it. I grew up Jewish,

and I would go to Temple, and I'd hear these prayers, it's like, it's just mechanical. There's no relationship to my life here in California. It's just mechanical. So our sense of religion is very distanced. You know, it doesn't, I mean, there are people who now who are religious who don't have that experience, I understand. But a lot of us feel that way about organized religion.

But we're hungry for that experience, and we can't get it from science. We can't get it from our crap culture that feeds us just junk and, you know, and stimulates us constantly with little jolts of entertainment, to distract us and endlessly keep us jolted like an experimental rat or something. We can't get it from our culture. That's why people are turning to drugs. That's why they're turning to psychedelics. They need that experience. There's a deep hunger for it because it's embedded in human nature.

It goes back thousands of years. It goes back 30,000 years, right? I tell the story in the book of the discovery of one of those caves in France where the art is on the wall and it's like an insanely sublime experience for these modern people who entered it, okay? Yeah, this is like prehistoric art. Yeah.

So 30,000 years, this is a cave from 30, over 30,000 years ago, one of the earliest ones. If people 30,000 years ago were trying to have a sublime experience in that cave, and I explain how it was, how they made it into a sublime experience with music

kind of vibrating in that cavernous space with the art on the walls and the torches and it's kind of like flickering and things are coming to life you're seeing bison's like running that's human we wanted it 30,000 years and we want it now because that's how our brains are wired

consciousness gives us the sense that we think we know the world but at the same time we know we don't it teases us so the sublime is in your brain rain, you want it, you deeply want it. It was part of religion. And so our hunger is for religious life experiences. And you talk about how, in part for that reason, we often seek out what I think you've described before as kind of like fake sublime experiences, like alcohol, pornography, whatever,

false sublime. Like, what is it that those kinds of experiences, what is it that makes them close enough to use the word sublime, but not close enough to still call them false sublime? Like, what are they getting and what are they not? Well, people feel like they're kind of getting outside of themselves, right? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay, so you drink a lot of beer or whatever alcohol, and you act differently, and the world seems a little bit differently, okay? But the difference is the following.

those kinds of things are like addictions right porn is an addiction shopping is an addiction you know video games are an addiction so addictions have tolerance levels and they go down and down and down and down you need more and more and more you need more of a shock need more of that you are not in control of it it is in control of you your brain is is making act in compulsive ways right The sublime is an act of will. It's not like somebody giving it to you. It's not like a jolt from a porn video. It's not like a jolt.

It's something that comes from deep within. It's inside of you. You're generating it within it. You're cultivating this emotion. When somebody is giving it to, you're passive. And that's what makes it false. It makes it feel like I'm getting outside of myself. But somebody else is controlling it.

Okay? So you're not really getting outside of yourself. You're being conditioned by somebody else. And I look at like movies now, and I see like Marvel comic type thing. And I see them as trying to be sublime. They're trying to create a sensation of these are ancient gods. They're able to do all these powerful things.

You know, and they have the photography is great in nature and all that. But it's the false sublime because just feeding you with images, it's just dousing your mind and things that are manipulating you, that are giving you the sense of transport, but somebody else is doing the transporting for you. The sublime has to come from within. It has to be an inner experience that you generate, or it's not sublime.

Isn't death something that happens to you as well? Like, you know, the kind of experience that you might have with an NDE, with a near-death experience, it doesn't feel like something I, at least intentionally generate, but maybe there's still a sense in which you want to say that that comes from within rather than from without, if you know what I mean. Well, death is not something that somebody creates for you. It's not, it's not a culture that's, you know, giving you an experience, okay? it's not God for me who's like making you have this death experience death is a part of you

death is inside of you death is who you are you are dying you are half alive you are dying at this very moment right it is who you are life and death are one

they're not separated so it is something that lives inside of you and when you some people don't die with any kind of sublime experience and why is that because they're in a hospital,

they're surrounded by all this technology, people are trying desperately to keep them alive. They're not open to the experience itself. They're not experiencing their own death. It's being done to them, right? So your relationship to death has to come from within. It has to be something you choose. You choose to feel this way.

So when Alos Huxley was dying, his wife wrote a book called This Time, moment about how his death was. He took LSD three hours before he died, right? And because that was always his intention, okay? He chose to have a sublime experience on his death, but now obviously you die in a car accident, you don't have that choice. So there are limitations to that. But it is, I don't know if you've ever read one of my favorite writers growing up, up as a kid was Carlos Castaneda and his books. You're not familiar with that?

No, I haven't read any. Such a California 1970 thing. But he's a fantastic writer. Had a huge impact on me, a huge impact on my ideas. And it basically is a story of a Mexican-American young anthropology student at UCLA who encounters a yacky sorcerer, a Mexican sorcerer, right, who takes peyote and transports himself into being a crow. They're fascinating, books that are amazing.

But he has this whole chapter, this whole thing about death, walking beside you, and it's always there at your side. And you look at it, and you can catch a glimpse of it, and it creates, he's making death an active process where you are actively engaging with it and making it sublime. So it's not something that has to just happen to you. It is something that you can actually engage in, even while you're alive. Yeah, well, that's something we've all got to look forward to, alongside, of course, looking forward to the publication of this book, which will eventually hit ourselves. Is it available for pre-order yet, or is it still sort of... I haven't even finished it yet. Vaguely

promise in the future. Well, I think there's at least an Amazon. page for it, even if it's just like a placeholder or something. So whatever information there is, I'll leave a link in the description so people can notify themselves. But keep your eyes out about a year from now, and there'll be more to come. And perhaps we'll have to speak again near the time as well. It's been five years in the making, so I'm actually very anxious to get it out there and share it with the world and not have it just all be in my damn head. Yeah, I bet. Well, by the sounds of it, I think it will be a worthwhile project for anybody to read. So thank you for taking the time to talk about some of that stuff in advance, as

it were I appreciate it and probably spoiled the whole book but anyway I doubt it you know somehow I think there's there's probably more to this sublime business but we'll we'll have to wait and see Robert Green thank you so much for your time it's been fun thank you for having me Alex I really enjoyed it thank you