Jason Silva's Origin Story | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

[music playing]

JASON SILVA: I think that I was a restless kid, a very creative but restless kid that wanted answers. So I was afflicted by the bug of question and questioning everything.

And that inquiry sent me to beautiful spaces of mind and imagination, but also sent me to very dark spaces, whether it was thinking about mortality or thinking about impermanence and all these horrible things. I felt that my way of dealing with pushing away the darkness was by losing myself in beautiful things, so ineffable, transcendent experiences, the rhapsody of poetry, or the high you get from a beautiful film when it sucks you into its wonderland, or the orgasmic ecstasy of falling in love, ineffability, magical transience spaces of mind that were characterized by feelings of selflessness and timelessness.

So losing yourself, essentially, became my escape from existential dread. And I felt like it was my responsibility to find a way of clothing these numinous experiences. That's where the verbosity, the desire to bring back these experiences and share them with others has come from.

So in the same way that a musician might find inspiration and then he composes a song to describe that [inaudible] experience, or the way that a poet might have some inspired rhapsody with a lover and then he comes back and then writes a few words that touch a billion people.

People say some things just can't be put into words. I disagree. I think that's a form of laziness. I think that what's magical about words is that they can be used to describe everything. I really do believe that.

And so the more complex, sublime, beautiful, and ineffable an experience, the more I want to try and make a piece of content about what that is. It's me, in a way, having a creative battle against ineffability. It's like the universe is saying you cannot explain me. And I'm like, oh, yes, I can. So that's kind of my thing. It's a control issue for sure.