So the philosopher Joseph Campbell used to say that when we are transfixed by beauty,
we are beheld in a kind of aesthetic arrest, right.
We are so transfixed that we stop breathing, we well up inside.
We experience what Camus says, as life lived to the point of tears, right.
And why do we love these experiences so much?
Because they arrest time. They freeze time.
They force us to marvel.
They allow us to become contemplative beings.
To enter those head spaces outside of normal Euclidian space and time,
and provide a kind of respite of the human condition, right.
We temporarily step off that people mover that's carrying everyone else towards death
and we become gods outside of time, reveling in a kind of ecstatic illumination!
Staring into the sun and being moved by its magnificent opulence, you know!
The universe singing in rapture and us just like, drowning in it.
It's like the last scene in the movie "The Fountain" when he becomes, like,
the bubble in that explodes in space, you know.
There's a kind of mythic, ah, death and rebirth
and this weird resurrection happening, you know.
It's, it's ah,
we smash our sense of separateness in these moments, and um,
yeah it's kind of wonderful.
And I just think that's why we do it.
It's therapy.
Awe is therapy.
Inspiration is therapy.