Shekhar Natarajan

You know, it's interesting.

I, um, I can't help but want to bring up the subject matter of awe.

You know, I, my entire YouTube series is called shots of awe and making videos about the subject of awe for 12 years.

And it's,

The reason is that I have found sort of that confrontation or that direct encounter with that which exceeds our mental maps.

You know, the Greater Good Science Center in Berkeley, the work of Dacher Kelter describes awe as an experience of such perceptual vastness or such perceptual expansion that our assumptions, the mental models of the world that we use to orient ourselves are forced into a state of humbling accommodation.

They just completely dissolve, right?

And the mental health crisis right now, one of the sort of transformative interventions is the return of psychedelics and the idea that these psychotechnologies, because they are technologies, can put us into places beyond our maps where we can encounter the mysterium tremendum,

the full sort of naked encounter with the mystery of being and how that ends up having these incredibly pro-social effects.

Like what happens is this humbling accommodation before the mystery, like makes us more compassionate, makes us have more wellbeing, you know, makes us want to extend our hands to others.

Like there's just something that happens, you know.

Now granted,

It has to do with set and setting and context in which people partake in these psychotechnologies.

You can also have ego inflation.

You know, a lot of these Silicon Valley tech bros have taken psychedelics and haven't become necessarily more compassionate and more empathetic.

But I just feel like artists, psychedelics, consciousness, you know, more works of beauty, that these are things that could move mountains potentially.

I've always felt that a great work of art can change the world.

A great film can change the world.

I mean, my heroes are people like

Chris Nolan you know he makes a film like Oppenheimer like how does that change potentially the conversation we have about nuclear weapons but everybody's affected differently but like for me like when I encounter transcendent art when I encounter experiences of awe I sometimes feel it becomes at least self-evident in my experience I'm like oh this is the path this is how everybody changes this is how we scale a shift in consciousness you know so let me let me provoke a little bit more