The Dish

Adam Frank rejects the idea that awe is the “sole province of modern religion,” instead holding that it is “something that is common to all human experience” – which makes it the ideal starting point for conversations between believers and atheists:

[I]t is in response to the experience of awe that we are set on the road to science or the road to spirituality. In that way, you can just as easily ask, “Is the awe of the religious really just scientific response?” as you can ask, “Is the awe of the atheist really a religious response?” In all cases, the significance of this “oceanic feeling,” a term Sigmund Freud popularized, is that it’s pre-scientific and pre-religious. It comes before we opt for explanations of any kind … It’s easy in these discussions to split apart into our usual camps — the atheist vs. the religious. But rather than use this universal sense of awe of as point of contention, it could become a point of where the discussion gets really interesting. I’ve argued for some time that the word “sacred” is, historically, not rooted in any particular religion but refers to exactly that eruption of awe into our everyday lives.

It’s about attention not attribution.

So what if we — atheists and religious folk alike — asked ourselves about both the similarities and differences? What if we made awe the pivot point around which a new kind of respectful discussion might begin? Of course some strident folks will not want to have this kind of dialogue. They’ll want to remain behind their parapets. But for me, that only means they’re no longer interested in the subtleties of their own positions.

Recent Dish on religion and awe here.

Beckett Mufson introduces Jeff Frost’s mesmerizing short film Circle of Abstract Ritual:

Jeff Frost has been filming Circle of Abstract Ritual since he spontaneously decided to capture a timelapse of the Anaheim riots in 2012. Since then—with help from a very successful Kickstarter—he’s been gathering strange and surreal timelapse footage of abandoned buildings, deserted deserts, fiery hillsides, and open roads. The result is a beautifully shot, highly atmospheric glimpse into the underbelly of California, composed of 300,000 still photos. Frost’s stellar cinematography characterizes the city as a dark, mysterious place, where the seemingly familiar streets and avenues harbor a sense of foreboding—under his meticulous lens, even the white, puffy clouds seem to be harbingers of an oncoming storm.

Frost elaborates on his inspiration for the film, explaining that it “began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing”:

The destruction end of that thought began in earnest when riots broke out in my neighborhood in Anaheim, California, 2012. I immediately climbed onto my landlord’s roof without asking and began recording the unfolding events. The news agencies I contacted had no idea what to do with time lapse footage of riots, which was okay with me because I had been thinking about recontextualizing news as art for some time. After that I got the bug. I chased down wildfires, walked down storm drains on the L.A. River and found abandoned houses where I could set up elaborate optical illusion paintings. The illusion part of the paintings are not an end in themselves in my work. They’re an intimation of things we can’t physically detect; a way to get an ever so slight edge on the unknowable.

New research suggests there are real benefits to vegging out – so long as you don’t guilt yourself out of them:

Participants were recruited via a gaming website and through psychology and communication classes.  Specifically, the participants answered questions about the previous day, including how much work or study they’d done (answers ranged from half an hour to 16 hours), how depleted they felt after work or college, how much TV they’d watched or video-gaming they’d played (this averaged around two hours), whether they viewed it as procrastination, whether they felt guilty, and how recharged they felt afterwards.

The key finding is that the more depleted people felt after work (agreeing with statements like “I felt like my willpower was gone”), the more they tended to view their TV or gaming as procrastination, the more guilt they felt, and the less likely they were to say they felt restored afterwards. The same findings applied for TV or video games.

“Rather than diminishing the beneficial potential of entertaining media,” the researchers said, “we believe that the results of this study may ultimately help to optimise the well-being outcomes of entertaining media use by extending our knowledge of … media-induced recovery and general well-being.” If the researchers are correct, then if you cut yourself some slack when you watch TV after a hard day, you’re more likely feel rejuvenated afterwards.

Benjamin Breen prefers the 19th-century literature of laughing gas to the druggy musings of 1960s writers like Timothy Leary. He cites the “exuberant, experimental, playful, funny, honest, and intellectually curious” trip-lit of William James:

After huffing a large amount of nitrous oxide, James set out to tackle a prominent bugbear of 1880s intellectual life: Hegelian dialectics. He came up with a stream of consciousness that centered on a kind of ecstatic binary thinking:

Don’t you see the difference, don’t you see the identity?
Constantly opposites united!
The same me telling you to write and not to write!
Extreme—extreme, extreme! Within the extensity that “extreme” contains is contained the “extreme” of intensity
Something, and other than that thing!
….
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it’s pure onsense!
Thought much deeper than speech … !
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL!
Oh my God, oh God; oh God!

James acknowledged to his readers that these ravings were the product of a mental state that, like alcohol intoxication, “seems silly to lookers-on.” But he came away from the experience with a remarkably positive take on nitrous oxide. James had argued that drunkenness produced a kind of “subjective rapture” occasioned by its ability to make “the centre and periphery of things seem to come together.” Nitrous oxide, he believed, produced a similar effect, “only a thousandfold enhanced.” On the gas, his mind was “seized … by logical forceps” and jolted into a new order of consciousness which, he thought, made the logic of Hegelian dialectics perfectly obvious to him.