The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck – How Mystical Experiences Help Us Survive

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This video was created by @Jason_Silva and shot and edited with his friends at Bravo Media, and is non-commercial and for educational and inspirational purposes only. Full credits and clip attributions can be found below. This video was inspired by this idea:

1) The ideas of psychologist Nicholas Humphrey who has written of “THE BIOLOGICAL ADVANTAGE OF BEING AWESTRUCK”. Basically, our ability to awe was biologically selected for by evolution because it imbues our lives with sense of cosmic significance that has resulted in a species that works harder not just to survive but to flourish and thrive…

Child-awestruck-face1“Humphrey refers to consciousness as a magic show that you stage for yourself inside your head, which lights up the world and makes you feel special and transcendent…

this magical theater provides a reason to live, a love of occupying the present moment, and a desire to sustain it into the future, that over time has proved stronger than anything else, and accounts for humanity’s swift and triumphant success–“

Humphrey says “being enchanted by the magic of experience, rather than being just an aid to survival, provides an essential incentive to survive.”

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“We relish just being here. We feel “the yen to confirm and renew, in small ways or large, our own occupancy of the present moment, to go deeper, to extend it, to revel in being there, and when we have the skill, to celebrate it in words..”

 

 

5 thoughts on “The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck – How Mystical Experiences Help Us Survive”

  1. This is one very powerful video! Thanks Patchman and Web Genie for this beautiful display of human experience.

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