Video Source: Shots of Awe with JASON SILVA
In this highly entertaining 3-minute video, Jason Silva explains how music can heal us. Below is the full transcript:
The human mind can only perceive three dimensions of physical space and then the fourth dimension of time. So again, space and time is the space in which we dwell – the dimension in which we live. We can't see or perceive other dimensions, so for the time being we are limited to this four-dimensional reality.
What's really interesting is our capacity to pattern that four-dimensional reality. And one of the reasons that I love things like music is that music and cinema and media is a kind of painting in time. You know, whereas other artwork like if you look at a painting on the wall. That is a static 2D image – that is not necessarily an experience that unfolds in time. It's an experience that unfolds in space.
But music is a pattern slice of space and time. Music is a subjective experience that you actually step into and that actually unfolds in the dimension in which we actually live and breathe, which is that four-dimensional reality. So, when you talk about the power of rhythm, when you talk of a power of collective ecstasy – why people go to concerts, why people go to festivals – because the musicians essentially start by instrumental rhythm. So, all of a sudden, they create a collective synchronized rhythm, that again, is patterned in space and in time.
And you're hearing it, and it loops around. It's like dat-da-dat-dat-da-dat…
So, you start to pattern the rhythm that unfolds in space and time. And then you invite the audience to step into it. So, all of a sudden everybody becomes synchronized, you know. So, we all become one thing and that's what's called collective experience.
In that ecstasis, in that merger where everybody become synchronized under one patterned experience that unfolds in space and in time is when music purges us. It's when music leads to that aesthetic arrest, that consummation. We pop out on the other side of that experience saying, “Oh my God, that festival was amazing. I feel so connected to the people; the vibes were so good. You had to be there to know what I feel.”
These experiences are ineffable – they are beyond articulation. Words do not give them justice. We can't just tile the experience over with description. You have to see it to believe it; you have to experience to know what I'm talking about.
The ineffability of these of these musical ecstatics – of this capacity of music and concert and vibe and people together to create these shared ecstasy, this electronic Buddhism, in which the self vanishes – is one way in which we escape death. It's one way in which we pierce the finite, and for a second we become infinite.
And this is a beautiful thing. It's why I pattern playlists of music on my phone. That's why I hang out with friends and always want to play the music in the background. I mean, this is what we do: we pattern, we colonize, we decorate, we architect, we stage space and time!
We are four dimensional engineers, my friends. That's what we are.
