Transcription
The process [music] of the neural sublime is defamiliarizing everything. Nothing is familiar anymore. Everything is unfamiliar, is weird [music] and strange and wonderful. That is opening up this consciousness and kind of giving it an expansiveness that you don't normally have in this scattered world.
How do you make your yourself more present and more alive in the moment? The exercises I I give you in the chapter are kind of making you aware of what I call pure consciousness. Okay? And so you're sleepwalking because your brain is operating on automatic and you have no control over it and you're not aware of it.
So the process of experiencing the neural sublime is a process of selfawwakening and seeing that as it happens in the moment and seeing how your brain is tricking you into this. So in the chapter I give you these exercises and I'm saying that consciousness think of consciousness in this metaphor. It is pure. It is like that sky I mentioned the blue sky. It has no limits, no boundaries, no north, south, east, or west. It goes on forever, right? It's pure. And you don't have it anymore. Your consciousness is now very constricted. It's not like that infinite blue sky. It's cloudy. It's murky. It's full of all this crap, all this dirt. Okay? We're trying to purify it. We're trying to go back to that pure consciousness.
I give you um exercises on trying to perceive the world around you. first of all without all of those filters. So for instance, you take a walk, but it could happen in your room. You don't have to take a walk here. But when you look at things, drop the words for them. Try and spend an hour where you're not looking at things as they are as symbolized through these abstract words that you have and to actually look things as they are in their own strangeness.
So the world for you has become too familiar visually, sensually, thinking-wise. The process of the neural sublime is defamiliarizing everything. Nothing is familiar anymore. Everything is strange. A child, a baby, that strange little mass of 12 pounds of of flesh crying all the time. What a strange little creature that is. a snail crawling on the ground. The snail has these antenna has a very strange world. Snails are very strange. Clouds in the sky are not just these things that you never think of that. They're weird. Imagine there's no other planet in the universe that is going to have clouds like we have because we have an atmosphere. Because we have certain conditions, you know, there'll be clouds but they won't be like ours. How strange they are.
Everything is unfamiliar is weird and strange and wonderful. That is opening up this consciousness and kind of kind of giving it an expansiveness that you don't normally have. And then as I said with childhood making everything have this kind of emotional quality where it's not just concepts and intellectual things but everything strikes you in your body physically. It's opening yourself up physically to the world itself and expanding your your your your your senses. Okay?
So on and on and on your thinking I'm trying to open up your thinking process so that you don't have these same narrow thoughts over and over and over again. And you go through exercises where you scramble your normal thinking patterns and you think the opposite of what you normally do. So you what you think is ugly and dirty and disgusting, I want you to imagine that it's beautiful and wonderful and everything that's beautiful, you know, like something airbrushed image of something is actually repulsive and ugly. I want you to alter your patterns of thinking on and on and on. Mess with your own brain. Play with your brain. play with your consciousness and kind of it's like clay that you can mold and create your own brain for itself. It is the most exciting adventure you can ever go on if you learn to go through this process.