Access the Sublime & Live Your Best Life | Robert Greene
In a Nutshell
Robert Greene argues that the sublime—intense, transcendent experiences that expand consciousness beyond routine perception—is accessible in everyday life through deliberate practices rather than requiring drugs or exotic travel. After his stroke, he discovered that slowing down perception, practicing "self-remembering" meditation, handwriting, and engaging senses with unpredictable natural phenomena (like watching clouds or fish) can dissolve the brain's filtering mechanisms and restore childlike wonder. The core message is that modern life's speed, social media, and ego-protection prevent these experiences, but anyone can access the sublime by reconnecting with childhood impulses, embracing vulnerability in love, and deliberately shifting attention away from human drama toward the non-human world of nature, time, and cosmic scales.
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People would come to Robert Greene and say they did not know their life's task even though they were in their 20s. He realized they had lost connection to childhood experiences where they naturally felt excited about something. Parents, teachers, and other voices had intervened and told them what they should love and what they were good at, constraining their natural interests. The key is to cut out those voices and return to childhood moments where genuine excitement occurred that was not dictated by others.
Robert Greene's book The Law of the Sublime focuses on how people experience day-to-day life rather than success, power, or relationships. Greene envisions consciousness as a circle where thoughts move within certain limits. Within this circle, experience becomes constricted with a sense of sameness. Peak experiences that change people, as Maslow described, occur outside this circle. The sublime lies outside this circle and provides doorways to another reality that shakes up familiar experience.
The word sublime in Latin means up to the threshold of a door. The sublime is a mix of pain and pleasure. The pain comes from being outside the comfort zone and away from what is familiar. The pleasure comes from the newness, novelty, and excitement it generates. When a child is born, the circle of consciousness is large because the world feels new and fresh. As people age, this circle gets smaller and more constricted, and imagination is used less frequently.
Greene took drugs in his late teens and early 20s that had lasting effects. One particular peyote trip in Mendocino, Northern California, altered how he viewed life itself. He originally planned to write about extraordinary experiences like taking ayahuasca in the Amazon and swimming with dolphins. After his stroke, he could not travel or take drugs safely. While sitting in his hospital bed after the stroke, he looked out the window and saw everything as strange and beautiful, with an incandescence he had never noticed before. This feeling came from the shadow of death passing over him.
After returning home, Greene realized the sublime is part of everyday life and exists everywhere around us. He began seeing an entire world in his backyard filled with insects, life, flowers, and trees. Looking at ordinary objects like a cup reveals weird shapes, funny colors, and materials that exist independently of their use value. When taking drugs, including cannabis, something shifts in the brain where objects are seen as they are rather than through their functions. This perception matches how children naturally see the world.
The human body is the product of 800 million years of evolution. The nervous system evolved during the Cambrian explosion when eyes, optic nerves, and nervous systems first developed. After eye surgery where a surgeon removed a small cancerous melanoma and replaced skin from the ear, the skin began growing back within 10 days. This automatic healing process represents a quasi-miracle that occurs in daily life.
Michael Murphy, one of the founders of the Esalen Institute, experienced a blackout and fall that altered his pixelation of the world. This change allowed him to appreciate different colors and shapes in environments he had spent significant time in. Artists like Chuck Close and El Greco had visual deficits that enabled them to create art at different spatial scales. El Greco's figures have odd shapes as if viewed through a concave mirror due to an eye condition.
Accessing the sublime does not require changing default perception through external means. There is a portal through thinking about current perceptions differently. Greene discusses the neurosublime and how the brain constructs the world around us. He references Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke experience and the Armenian mystic Gurdjieff, who visited esoteric cults in the Middle East and Far East at the turn of the 20th century to preserve their disappearing knowledge.
Gurdjieff believed what makes humans human is attention. Animals have attention limited to what is in front of them for survival needs, while humans can look up at the sky and wonder about what exists beyond mountains. People are sleepwalking through life and not truly awake. If humans were truly awake, there would be no wars or misery inflicted on fellow humans. Gurdjieff developed an exercise called self-remembering where people focus deeply on an experience and tell themselves they are remembering it.
The exercise involves looking at things deeply and focusing while telling yourself you are remembering the moment. Most people will never remember what happened on a specific day three years ago because they were asleep and not paying attention. The exercise requires telling yourself that you are experiencing the moment and will remember it. After practicing this exercise for months, Gurdjieff's pupil Ouspensky noticed that flowers started looking different, houses appeared almost alive, and everything became intense. He realized that normally in life people are asleep, and this intense focus made him aware of that state.
Meditation can alter neurology and how people perceive things without requiring drugs. Greene practices meditation every morning. Research shows meditation literally alters the brain and that thoughts can alter the wiring of the brain. Tibetan Buddhists and Zen Buddhists achieve similar effects through meditation practices. The exercises in each chapter of the book are designed to bring these ideas into daily experience rather than remaining academic concepts.
The brain filters reality to create familiarity and prevent the mind from being overwhelmed by chaos. Aldous Huxley in Doors of Perception described the mind as a funnel that prunes sensory input so we can function. The sublime is not about hallucinating or seeing something crazy; it is awakening to reality outside the brain's pruning mechanisms.
Paul Cézanne was obsessed with vision and how focusing on things could alter perception. His expression was that humans are given consciousness so we can spread consciousness everywhere. He declared himself the consciousness of the landscape, making it come alive through his attention. He stared at an apricot tree outside his house, seeing the apricots growing larger and sweeter in the sun, experiencing what felt like an erotic relationship between the fruit and sunlight.
Seeing a vase of flowers as an intense, miraculous thing by focusing on colors and life is not imagination—it is seeing things as they actually are. The speaker expresses frustration with how rational culture has become, noting that even scientists anthropomorphize AI despite knowing it is a programmed machine without consciousness. Humans are creatures that constantly project emotion onto things, and this capacity has a basis in science itself.
Highway 101 and Highway 280 in California contain old fence lines with barbed wire where the interface between wire and wood holds infinite detail. The experience of awe arises when transitioning quickly between spatial scales—from small details to vast vistas or vice versa. There are infinite spatial scales and infinite temporal scales through which experience can be accessed.
Daily life operates at a constrained frame rate dictated by circadian rhythms. This snapshot speed can be altered by slowing down—watching espresso pour with immense temporal detail or lying in the yard observing clouds passing. Near-death experiences and the dying process reveal that the space-time filter can dissolve. Barbara, dying of cancer, began experiencing the tiniest details with super high resolution and near-infinity frame rate, extracting what felt like years of experience in her final days.
Childhood time felt different because there was space between thoughts—an emptiness where a minute might pass without another thought arriving. This created a different rhythm of life. Modern attention, fragmented by social media into millions of splinters, eliminates this space between thoughts, making time feel too fast and broken. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Speak, Memory to recreate his childhood experience, not facts. As a child, time was inside him like a river; as an adult, he stood on the shore observing time pass externally.
During 40-minute meditations, time sometimes passes without awareness, altering its concept through slowness. This creates a physical sensation of being inside the flow of time, alive moment to moment in the present. The exercise of imagining oneself inside a river and feeling time's flow produces a different consciousness effect.
As the brain dies, constructions such as time, vision, and the self begin dissolving. Approximately 85% of near-death experiences are positive, though some are hellish. People report ecstasy as the ego dissolves and abstract time dissolves, feeling liberation from social pressures. Albert Heim, a 19th-century Swiss alpine climber, studied near-death experiences after surviving a 100-foot fall. In 15 seconds of falling, he experienced what felt like years of life events. Survivors of Golden Gate Bridge jumps report the same phenomenon.
Observing fish tanks or ocean waves releases the brain's expectation component because outcomes cannot be fully predicted or controlled. This unlatching allows the mind to enter new and useful states. The presence of unpredictable elements, within known constraints like gravity, prompts the brain to go somewhere new.
Craig Foster's relationship with an octopus, documented in My Octopus Teacher, altered his time perception. Living in the octopus's compressed three-year lifespan—with attacks, limb loss and regrowth, egg-laying and death—he experienced time at a different rhythm. Entrainment occurs when humans align with other species' rhythms, such as dogs requiring daily walks. The same principle applies to plants; interactions with tomato plants can access different time domains.
Excessive social media use locks people into a single time-space relationship driven by dopamine and novelty. Removing the phone for a weekend, keeping it out of the bedroom, or avoiding it for the first 30 minutes of the day significantly alters and improves daily experience. The human brain requires slowness for mastery—learning bit by bit creates new neural pathways. When external rhythms program attention, the brain's landscape becomes a desert with no emerging life or connections, leaving people vulnerable to influence and unable to think independently.
Olympic gold medalist Ailen Goo, a freestyle skier and Stanford student, was asked during a press conference about training her mind. Her answer focused on slowness rather than speed. She spends significant time examining her own thinking, pressure-testing her beliefs, and understanding how to shape thoughts through neuroplasticity to become the person she wants to be. She noted that being young means she still has plasticity available. The speed she demonstrates reflects the reflection and slowing down of her process.
Quarterback John Elway described the secret to his success as everything slowing down on the football field. At the highest level, his brain could see exactly where things were moving, allowing him to perceive what others could not through mastery of process.
People increasingly record experiences in real-time to share with others, whether at concerts or during adventures like backpacking trips in Yosemite or the Amazon. While sharing has value, most people now think about how they will report experiences, if not during them, then afterward. This creates a collision of brain circuits that detracts from the actual experience.
Robert Greene wrote his book by hand because his left hand was partially frozen after an injury. He used a system of two bookstands with notebooks. He would write a story by hand, edit it by hand through recopying, and repeat this process multiple times. This slowness altered his thought processes compared to typing, creating a different kind of book. When handwriting, thinking must slow down and focus more deeply because quick changes are not possible.
Modern life keeps people locked in the human social world, even in nature when using phones for navigation and recording. Life is much greater than the human sphere—it includes the universe, cosmos, animals, landscapes, the weirdness of being alive, and time. Ancient and indigenous cultures were obsessed with what is not human, which is where religion and spirituality originated. They observed plants emerging from the ground, enormous mastodons, and bears twice the size of modern bears.
Mountain climbing represents a sublime experience because climbers ascend something millions of years old that predates humans. Rock climbers report intense sublime experiences because at every moment they could die, making the intensity of life and death addictive. However, filming or navigating a mountain through technology prevents experiencing the mountain itself.
Technology can be used for the sublime when not focused on social reporting or ego. Greene uses it to access images from NASA and new telescopes about the universe, but the focus is on the experience itself rather than influencing others.
Laboratory science involves years of looking through microscopes collecting data, followed by separate processes of writing papers and presenting at meetings. The adventure occurs at the microscope, while reporting happens at a completely different speed. Rick Rubin encourages artists to forget about perception in order to do their best work, which is then perceived in the best way.
When listening to music, such as a Scarlatti recording by Horowitz, entering the flow alters the experience of time. This involves seeing rhythms, patterns, and emotional effects of falling notes, thinking along with the music and reliving the composer's experience. Music is sublime because it takes people back to preverbal roots—language likely evolved from music. Instrumental music feels like the essence of emotions and consciousness.
At Grateful Dead concerts in the 1970s, long instrumental pieces could be experienced sublimely by entering inside the music rather than treating it as entertainment. Movies from different periods can similarly be experienced by feeling inside them rather than thinking about how others see them.
News anchors during storms are in the experience of reporting rather than the experience itself. Technology can fractionate people through the pressure to share. The speed of reporting and its separation from the experience itself matters significantly.
Greene filled over 100 notebooks with handwritten material. At the end, he used whisper transcription, printed it out, edited by hand again, then dictated and edited one final time. The relationship between brain and hand has ancient roots, as neural pathways for intelligence developed through picking up objects and creating tools. Handwriting uses the brain differently than typing or dictating.
Handwriting is a sensual experience involving thinking about each movement, ink flow, and seeing ink on a page. Greene used fountain pens and different colored inks from an Italian company called Viscanti, including sepia, black, turquoise, red, and green, choosing colors based on daily feeling.
The hand representation in the brain is nested inside language areas. Italians move their hands while speaking. When formulating sentences carefully, hands tend to go still, then move spontaneously when verbal flow is achieved. Language reflects this connection through phrases like grasping an idea, and many words for thinking and knowledge relate to grasping and hand use.
Human consciousness is constricted by language and grammar patterns, including subject-object structures that create cause-and-effect thinking and past-present-future tenses. An alien intelligence with different grammar structure not based on hand manipulation would have a very different language and thinking patterns.
Good teachers know that they know more than their students, but they have to put their minds in the minds of the students who don't know enough. You have to kind of lower yourself into their way of not lower but inside their less knowledgeable experience. So you have to go like why wouldn't they know it? Why would they have because if you think about your early childhood, you had those moments, right? You knew that you would love this. You loved kicking a ball. I had I loved sports, right? You knew that I loved music and sounds. I talk a lot about how Howard Gardner and his five frames of intelligence. You had one of them. But thinking deeply about their experience, I came to realize that first of all, they've lost a deep connection to those childhood experience, to those moments they forgotten about them. Why have they forgotten about them? Maybe they weren't as intense as mine was. But also what happened was all these other voices intervened, right? Their parents told them what they should love, what they shouldn't love. They had to learn math and they didn't want to learn math. The teachers told them what they were good at. They get funneled through this system which kind of constrains your brain into a certain career path. This is what you have to learn, right? And they hear a thousand different voices in their head and they have no connection to what they really love. to what Abraham Maslo calls your impulse voices. Voices inside of you that you're that are natural, that are physiological inside of you. They don't hear it anymore.
We have to cut out all of those voices. I would go through this process and I compared it to like archaeology. We were digging and digging and digging into their childhood for little fossils of information. I would kind of go through a process of can you remember certain moments in your early what's what are your earliest childhood memories? What are memories of things that were very exciting to you? We literally had to go back into their childhood to uncover those moments where something sparked and they were excited not because their parents told them but because it was them. And for me, it's a hard concept to understand because I always had that. But people lose touch with what they act, what their own bodies, what their own impulses, their own desires are telling them. And so we would cut through all of the other noise.
I would also go through this process of you're in your 20s. What is it that you hate? What repels you? What repulses you? For me, I hated working for other people. I'll just lay it out straight. I hated the egos. I hated the political games. I had people wasn't about results. It was about currying up to the boss and how good you were with the charming stuff. I hated it. I never lasted more than 11 months at any single job in my entire life. So, knowing that I could not work for other people, the only thing I could do was write books. It's the only profession for me where I had didn't have a boss essentially. I mean, you kind of have a boss, but anyway, what is it that you hate? What are the things that you can't do that when you do they just feel wrong? And a lot of it is when you were frustrated. That's the that's a key moment in your life. What is frustrating to you? Listen to that voice because it's it's it's part of that that life's task that that inner voice that's talking to you saying this isn't you. This doesn't fit you. Listen to it and don't just see frustration. See something positive. It's telling you something about what you're about how you've taken a wrong path in life. It's not easy. And I sometimes spend days with these people and and weeks trying to help them. But I've had had some success. But it takes time. You know, you have to be willing to commit to the time and you have to journal and you have to write about yourself and you have to go deep into your memories. You have to think about your childhood and you have to go back into those moments that had nothing to do with what other people were telling you.
I noticed after my stroke that I was more emotional. I had less control over my emotions. I would suddenly start crying and I don't really know why I was crying. I would suddenly feel mo kind of a wave of ecstasy. Why is it happening to me? And then I did a little bit of research and you would know more about this, but stroke the right side of the brain affecting the right side of the brain often has that effect on stroke victims. The left side is language and logic and and reasoning powers. The right side and these there's a lot of cliches involved in the left right things and I understand that but the right is is a more kind of holistic and more kind of emotional part of the brain. And so I was feeling on a deeper level. I was also feeling like so much more empathy for people, right? Like I would see other people who were handicapped who were still in a wheelchair and I would like almost want to cry and I would almost like damn it, I understand your weakness. I understand the [snorts] feeling of helplessness. So my brain shifted into something more emotional. I saw a quote from the poet John Keats, one of my favorite poets, and it said, "Oh, to have a life of sensations instead of thoughts." And so you can think emotionally, you can think through sensations, you can empathize, you can feel your way into things. And it's a different form of thinking. And it made me realize how much your brain and the structure of it alters how you think and how you relate to the world. So something I had no control over, a stroke, altered me in this weird way. It made me more emotional. So it makes you realize how the brain so much controls who you are and how you experience life. And so I had this much more kind of intuitive feel for the subject. The sublime was no longer an intellectual thing like it would have been 20 years ago. It was a feeling inside of me. And when I wrote a a story, it would resonate inside of me and I knew that it was right. And if it felt too intellectual, I said, "This isn't working for me."
I think so. And I think um I don't know. Uh it's going to sound woo woo. It's going to sound like I've I've gone off the deep edge, but it felt like the stroke happened for a purpose, right? And to me, the way I look at it is if I see it as a curse, I become a bitter person and I just shrivel up. But if I see it as a blessing, it's a much different experience. And the blessing was that I had to find the sublime in the smallest details. readers aren't going to be able to trek through the Gobi Desert. They're not going to be able, a lot of them swim with dolphins. They can't have these adventures. But everyone lives in a house in a room. We all feel kind of constricted. I could now make bring the sublime to the level of your daily experience because I compared myself the image that came to me when I sat in my little office trying to write the book was that I was a bird in a cage, right? I used to be flying around and having all this fun and now I was in a cage and I had to accommodate myself to a cage and I had to kind of find a way to sing inside my cage. And so a lot of people are like that. They don't have access. They don't live in mansions. They don't have magnificent gardens. They live in small apartments. And I don't want to give this feeling like the sublime is some elite experience that that only rich people can have. The point of the book is that the need for a transcendent experiences which what the sublime is about in many ways is as important a need to humans as clothing as shelter as companionship as anything else. It's deeply deeply embedded in our nature. Right? So I wanted to feel like everybody can have access to it. So, if a stroke victim whose life is so limited can find their way to the sublime, then that means that anybody can find their way. And that's how I wanted to write the book.
Several times you've said that accessing the sublime is about relating as a human to things that are not human. There are these people throughout history who seem to have so much energy and to ex focus that energy so intensely and do incredible things in art and you know oration you know like we might call this like charisma. And they often died early. And I've been really intrigued by this. like maybe they their energy was packed in space and time and and focus into such a like a dense beam that they couldn't go on a long time, right? Uh and I don't this is really woo what I'm about to ask but in researching this and writing uh the law of the sublime did you ever think about like what was the experience of some of the people that you had written about earlier like the intense life of somebody like 50 Cent the intense life of some of the people you wrote about in um the laws of seduction who are these extreme examples of life energy funneled through a particular personality and style. And many of whom I mean 50 is still around but many of whom are they die early. Did that ever come to you as as an idea like this isn't the slowpaced life. These are people that I see burn hot make huge contributions and flame goes out.
The sublime is often like an experience of intensity. Right? So concentrated in a particular moment is a very intense experience like a candle that's kind of burning. 50 himself, he had a near-death experience and in the last chapter of the book I do I talked with I did with him I call it the sublime and his sort of I feel like his near-death experiences completely altered him and although we see this figure of this entrepreneur and this kind of thug and this guy with beefs and he's always putting people down that'd be the last thing you'd think of as sublime but I know 50 I was with him. I spent six months by his side. I studied him deeply and his closeness to death altered him and is he actually has great access to that kind of energy that came from his near-death experience. Now, other people whose sense of power is only about the social, I don't really feel like a sense of the sublime. But if you're like a great writer or you're a scientist like Albert Einstein, he didn't die young. I don't think he did. No. And biologists on average tend to have good long careers. Mathematicians have briefer careers. Well, the mathematicians are interesting because it's a known fact that the greatest math discoveries are in your 20s and early 30s and then it just kind of dries up. Yeah. I think the Fields Medal can only be given to people I think it's 40 years and younger. Yeah. Biology is a more cumulative type career. Yeah. You have long careers that that are successful along the way and and accumulate a rich amount of knowledge. Yeah. Math is is uh it's a quick burn. I wonder why. It's very weird like that. I don't know. I mean, I'm intrigued by the fact that um child prodigies their peers eventually catch up to them. Uhhuh. People catch up. Like with mastery, people who go deep, deep into a field and then burn themselves out. The sublimity is in the sense of flow that they have. So the sublime, as I say, is kind of a transcendent experience. You're getting outside of your ego. You're getting outside the narrowness of your own little limited world and you're experience something wider. Right? When you study chess deeply or or Einstein with the theory of relativity or or whatever the field is, painting or whatever, you have these moments of intense flow where you and the thing that you're creating are one. You're outside of yourself. It's almost like an outer body experience, right? And I talk in the book about the feeling of inspiration, which is something that goes back thousands of years and people report it and I've experienced it myself where ideas seem to be coming to you from the outside. You can't explain why this epiphany happened. There's no logic, there's no order to it. It's almost as if somebody is breathing inside of you, which is the origin of the word inspired to breathe into something. Okay? So when you're so deeply immersed in a subject, you're kind of having this kind of moment of flow and this kind of transcendent experience and ideas are coming to you from the outside and you don't even know why or how and it is utterly sublime. So that is a connection between some of my earlier work and the later work. But a lot of these kind of master manipulators like an autobismark or like some of the chazari bora I can't really find anything sublime in their experience. I try to write about the dark side of human nature in the sublime book and how we can see something sublime in it but kind of the dark side of the sublime. There's something sublimely evil in the world, right? But that's that's really kind of another story. But the feeling when you're playing the piano and you feel like you and the keyboard are one or you're playing chess and you and the chessboard are one is a is a totally sublime moment. Totally sublime experience. So mastery of all my books is the one that's closest to the sublime.
Yes, most definitely. So I have a chapter called the love sublime and it's not the art of seduction and people are going Robert have you changed and I go well no seduction is a book in itself but love is something different and so I talk about the sense of falling so deeply in love with another human being that you lose a sense of your own ego. And the chapter is called escape the prison of the ego, the love sublime. And the idea is the human being is two sides to us. We're physical. We have an animal side, but we have something else. And I would I would hate to use the word, but I would say it's spiritual, right? And so if the only interest in in the other person is about sex, there's some level of satisfaction to it, but there's also an emptiness that goes with it, right? But if it's just about religion and about, you know, going to church or whatever, there's nothing physical in it and it doesn't feel so deeply human. It's just the spiritual. But I'm a human being. I have a body. I have sexual desires. I have all these other things going on inside of me that religion has nothing to do with. Love is an area where you can combine the physical and the spiritual into something very, very, very profound. And I say it's kind of the ultimate human experience that we can have because your physical attraction to someone turns into something spiritual. People are objects that we cannot see inside of them. But in love that object becomes a subject. They become something that's inside of them. You can feel their experience. They become a part of you. Now you people were wondering well that how often does that ever happen? You know that doesn't sound like my experience. What I try to explain is the metaphor we use is falling in love. And it's very eloquent. So it's literally a sense of falling. And falling has an element of fear, right? That's what you have to understand. Love isn't about comfort and security and and Russell Stover chocolates and and handing out red roses and Valentine's. There's something dark and terrifying about it because you're falling. You're letting go of your defenses and you're being vulnerable like an animal that's exposing its belly. And that's a frightening experience. And what happens to people is as you start falling, you stop and you go, I don't completely trust this person. I'm becoming vulnerable. And if I become vulnerable, this isn't conscious, it's unconsciously, they can hurt me. They could abandon me. And the feeling of abandonment is like perhaps the most primal horrible emotion for a human to have. It goes back to our early early childhood experiences, right? And so we stop falling and we start going, I'm not so sure about that. Maybe they don't love me as much or maybe I can't trust them. And as you go through that process, the other person senses it in a very primal way as well and they stop falling because they can feel that you're not following along with them. If you fell completely and you lost your defenses, the other person would be invited to fall along with you. And so the reason you've never experienced in your life is you don't want to be vulnerable. And that's very natural in the modern world because our life is harsh and there's so many intrusive things going on. You want to defend yourself. I'm trying to tell young people in particular that you live in a culture that does not want you to be in love with someone. They demean love. They demean the aspect of it. They think of it sentimental and old-fashioned. The concept of love that I'm bringing out right now. And I want to tell you that the act of loving a person and letting go of all your defenses is a form of rebellion against the ugliness in this world. You're you're doing something different. You're rebelling against all the narcissism and all the defensiveness and all the closed off elements in our culture and you're saying you to that culture. I'm going to fall in love with a single individual and it's going to be an incredible transcendent sublime experience. I want to bring that back into the culture because in the 13th century we had this uh this new thing called courtly love, right? And it's where our whole notions of western love came from. Right? Trouidor is writing about it. And the sense of love was a physical and a spiritual experience. And it was kind of sacrilegious because only Christ should be a spiritual experience. So there was something very kind of rebellious about this idea that loving a man or a woman could actually be a spiritual experience. I'm hoping in that chapter to bring back that value particularly among young people because they're so afraid of being vulnerable. They're so afraid of being hurt. And being heard is okay. It's a very important human emotion to go through. Rejection and feeling hurt is actually an experience that will grow you in a way. And never allowing that falling process to occur is I don't know you're going to miss something very deep in life. It does seem that people are in a very self-protective mode these days. Part of me wants to say it's because of the need for every experience including love to be reported on you go back to that but I think it's true. Yeah. You know like that people are going to have to post it and it's going to have to be shared. Actually, I found recently a a friend got married. Uh we're not real close, but um in a really stealth way, just like it, you know, and I wasn't close enough to them to be invited. And I was like, that's pretty awesome. They just like went and got married with the closest people. Yeah. Completely stealth. Yeah. This is a public facing person. Nobody knows it. Yeah. And the reason I think it's awesome is because it means it was just for them. Yeah. Yeah. and uh you know, and they're early in the relationship, but like that's that's pretty darn cool as opposed to the need to project it out to the world and tell everybody. And uh like that's I have this I call it the this demon. It's inside of you. It's a voice that's constantly telling you to mistrust the other person and to feel like something is wrong in the relationship. It's a demon inside of you that's speaking to you. And a lot of it is social. your friends will tell you will fill you with doubts about the other person. It's not cool to be so involved with another person. You're being egotistical. You're cutting yourself off. You're going to hear these voices. And that's what I meant about the culture is kind of against this whole thing. And so the social element is actually playing a very large part in the fact that you don't want to make a fool of yourself. for instance, you want people to think that you're cool, that you know, you you can sleep with many different women, that you're that you're not such a a soop, you know, you don't you're not gullible kind of thing. And so, it's a kind of a cynicism and a hardness that I I find very dangerous because the sublime is kind of letting go of things. And it's almost like softening yourself to the world and letting the world enter into you and kind of transport you. And that's what this kind of love sublime is inviting you into. Well, and the incel movement is the ultimate extreme of of this. Although now large part because of recent events, we're also seeing something kind of analogous to the incel movement on the female side. For sure. A lot a lot of they have a name for it. I can't remember what it is, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This uh I don't want to go down the socopolitical uh rabbit hole, but so there's a big divide right now that is really about lack of trust. Yeah. Love is been kind of relegated to the the uh idiots path. Yeah. Yeah. I don't believe that, but that's certainly what it seems like out there. just addressing the Andrew Tate kind of experience of the world and and sort of the alienation from the opposite sex and seeing them as kind of the enemy is is a very troubling thing. And what it is is it's like a fear of your own self because every man has a feminine side to him unavoidably. And why? Because our closest relationship as a baby was with our mother, a female, right? And we internalize her voice. We internalize her energy very deeply in a
We internalize our mother's voice and energy very deeply in a way we can't even remember. Our attractions to women are very much impressed upon us by our relationship to our mother. We were helpless for God's sake. And a woman was dominating our lives. We were dependent on her. So imprinted in a man besides the fact that a man has a fair amount of estrogen, there is a female component to the psyche. Women have the same thing. There's a masculine side to their psyche. When you split it off and women are the enemy, men are the enemy, you are actually the enemy of yourself. You are denying something deep about your own nature. The idea of a man and a woman is bringing together the feminine side and their masculine side and merging it. There's something complete and wondrous about it. It is opening yourself to your own nature. When you're angry at the other sex, you're actually angry at yourself in a deep way. You are afraid of the feminine that is deeply embedded inside of you.
A literal love relationship where people love God and feel that God loves them is a profoundly important part of their life experience. It gives them access to levels of perception and experience that are irreplaceable by humans. Accessing the sublime is about the relationship to the non-human. The depictions of Christ on the cross is a painful image, but there are these loving images of Christianity.
In Buddhism, there really isn't a concept of a higher being. It is that you yourself are Buddha. Buddha is mind and mind is Buddhist. So it's inside of you kind of thing. There are some elements of Christianity that way. When looking at the earliest religions, indigenous religions and spirituality in the pagan world, the need to feel transcended, to feel connected to something higher than the individual life, is deeply sublime. It is a deep human need.
The need for belief in something higher than ourselves exists because we're aware of our death. We're aware of our mortality unlike any other animal. Animals intuit the moment that they're going to die, but they don't think about it. Humans have the ability to think about death, and it cripples us. If I'm going to die, why write a book? Why spend all these years doing things? It's going to cancel everything out. There's no meaning or purpose to life. So awareness of death makes humans search for something higher, a deeper and deeper need inside.
Religion for centuries played a huge role in satisfying the need for transcendence. It was a very important need and it kept to some degree a level of sanity among humans. In the 18th century, religion really started to fade in western experience with the enlightenment, certain philosophers, the birth of science, and then the industrial revolution. The sense of God faded from experience. People are still religious today, but the sense of it being a living presence that was with you every moment is lost.
In the 14th century, God was a part of everything that you thought and did. Everything you saw, every food that you ate, every element of life was embedded in the sacred. Humans lost that. In the 19th century, the industrial revolution happened. Science. The world is changing and people started to rebel against that. They were frightened of it and there was the romantic movement. That is when the word sublime came into our language and became very popular. The romantic poets and philosophers popularized the word sublime.
Although there are a lot of religious people, the really deep sense of spirituality, the really deep sense of something larger than you that lives inside of you, that you are a part of and that is guiding your life, is lost. With it, a very important part of our life is lost. Religion was an anchor in our lives and now it's gone. The loss of religion, the loss of a sense of something transcended is partially making us insane. The world feels like a mad house. People are disconnected from their bodies, from their lives, from everything, from their environment. The loss of God, the death of God, the death of religion was a very painful moment in history and in the psyche.
Getting back to a transcendent experience can help solve this and get back to something very elemental. The discoveries of science have a very deep kind of spiritual component. Learning about the human brain is insane. There is something absolutely transcendent about studying the human brain. Learning about the cosmos, learning about the big bang is a spiritual experience. We can recover some of that in the modern world. We don't necessarily have to go back to organized religion, but a sense of feeling like we are part of something much larger than our individual lives is a critical component to our experience.
The book The Law of the Sublime is a portal into richer experience. The macro offering and hope for the book to have that impact was in the back of the mind, but it is a grandiose ambition. Recently seeing a film by the Italian director Pasolini called The Gospel According to St. Matthew was impactful. Pasolini, who was a homosexual Marxist and pretty much an atheist, grew up in Italian Catholic culture and fell in love with the idea of Christ. He did a film literally recreating the gospel according to Matthew, using all of the words from that chapter. He chronologically goes through all of the experiences of Christ and uses non-professional actors. The guy who plays Christ is a 19-year-old Spanish student of mathematics.
The movie is a very spiritual experience because it literally feels like you're there and you can understand where it comes from. When rereading the book of Matthew, the philosophy is so much about love. There's an expression where somebody asks, should I love my neighbor? And Christ says anybody can love your neighbor. What you need to love is the person who's not your neighbor. You need to love the person furthest away from your experience, the marginalized, the people that normally are hated. How can a religion that expresses that end up now being this kind of philosophy of division and hatred and marginalizing and polarization and victimization?
Taking something that's not of humans and humans contorting it, perverting it into something that's of them is the phenomenon. Perverted is the operative word. It is stolen spirituality. It is manipulated. One of the major barriers to the sublime is focusing on things that are of humans too much. The world's losing its mind because we have too much awareness of what other humans are doing all the time, and it's blocking our awareness of all the other stuff around us.
Reading the newspaper, there was an article about beginning to alter the idea of where alien life could evolve. There are these planets out there around a star that is much larger than our sun and therefore burns rather more slowly. They are perfectly round, not marked by all these meteors that would have hit planet Earth. Because they're a perfect distance from the sun, they probably have water and probably life forms could evolve on these planets. They were calling it a paradise of evolution. It would be an environment much more conducive to life than planet Earth. It took us almost 4 billion years to evolve intelligent life on planet Earth, and that's probably why we haven't encountered other alien intelligent life forms because it takes so long to develop. But these planets, their star won't burn out. They've probably been around much longer. They probably could be intelligent life.
Another article read was about dinosaurs and a fossil that was discovered in China of an early bird. It is the most preserved fossil of a bird in the dinosaur era. Birds evolved from dinosaurs. There were also flying pterosaurs. There were flying reptiles that weren't dinosaurs. They were explaining how beautiful the flight was, how they took to flight and the different forms of flight that occurred. On our planet, just imagine what that life was like back then. How insane it was that there were dinosaurs.
We could be immersing ourselves in all of these insane things that science is revealing to us. It could literally alter our minds and our relationship to people, to life. When you realize that life was this thin experiment that almost never happened, it alters how you look at things. We have to get outside the human, but scientists are the ones who are uncovering it. Humans are this insane creature that is able to uncover the secrets of the universe. In essence, the book says we are sublime, that we can uncover what is not human and the laws of the universe and things going on. It is not that the human is this ugly thing. Science is built up of hundreds of thousands of individual work research papers, people immersing themselves in details and then uncovering these fantastic things. Science is a sublime phenomenon and it's humans uncovering these insane stories.
In the early days of the internet back in the early 2000s, it was actually a realm of freedom. You could connect to somebody in Thailand who was interested in Nietzsche and John Coltrane, and you could talk and connect and see that you come from a very different culture. Why are you interested in these things? It was fascinating. It was this realm of freedom. It was like a giant human brain. Technology could be sublime. It could lead to a paradise. Humans have a sublime quality. But humans also have the capacity for something much different. The internet has become something that is not like it was in the early 2000s. It turned into something very ugly and very dark.
The real problem with humans is our propensity to get absorbed by drama and by numbing out. The mental practice in the morning involves a short meditation, very brief, doing the sunlight thing, but there is imagery implanted in the head of like a thin almost like a tightrope that has to be walked, and on either side is like a slide down to the not to the death but in one side is drama and the other side is numbing out. You have to get a certain distance and then that tightrope turns into more of a flat surface that you can rest on and stay. But those early hours, there are too many things, algorithms and so forth that can just yank you down either side of that tightrope and it's not good.
An important component to accessing the best of what is human, but also the nonhuman in order to enrich one's life and access the sublime is a slowing down. That means intentionally not leaping onto the time scale, the rhythm of just anyone, to be very deliberate about that or just anything. Humans have a tremendous amount of value to offer our lives, not just in love. It is getting harder and harder to have a great life, even with resources. The challenge becomes not getting yanked down the sides of this imagery. The barriers to a good life, to the sublime, are drama and numbing out.
Meditation and writing by hand are simple but very profound ways to get to the sublime. Keeping the phone out of the room when working and when relating to other people is important. A lot of the sublime is a function of your sensitivity to the world. You were born with these senses like any creature that are open that are constantly giving you feedback from the environment. That's what senses are for. That's what they're designed for, so you don't die, so you see there's a tiger over there and it doesn't kill you. Your senses are there to connect you to your environment, to connect you to the outside world.
There is a story about a Russian scientist at the turn of the 20th century who was a geographer sent to Siberia to map the forest there called the Taiga. He encounters an indigenous hunter named Deru, a lone hunter and trapper. The Russian scientist invites him to join their expedition as a scout. He slowly realizes that this man has an intelligence and a sensitivity to the environment that is far superior to anything that he possesses. He can read the sky and the climate and he knows the weather that's coming. He can see the birds and know what it indicates.
At one point they encounter a tiger. They hear a tiger growling through some bushes. The Russian guy gets frightened. He picks up his rifle and Deru says, put that rifle down. He goes walks up to the tiger, which he calls Ama, and he goes, Ama, calm down. We don't we're not here to hurt you. We understand you. This is your forest. We respect you. We will not harm you. And the tiger walks away. At the end of the story, Deru ends up getting murdered by some people who were stealing his trappings. The Russian scientist says we humans have lost something. If only we could keep our scientific culture, but also have these powers of our senses, we would be another animal. We would be insanely powerful and we wouldn't be so destructive.
We have powers that come through the senses. It is a form of intelligence. When our sensory experience is so limited, as it is as we live in towns and cities, it is so same. We're not really listening to sounds. We're not really smelling things. We're not really looking. Our thoughts become constricted. We think we're just intelligent animals, but we're physical creatures. Our intelligence is modeled after our senses. If we only see the same things, our minds kind of atrophy. Our creativity and our inventiveness came from being in these environments that were dangerous and we had to see and think and feel our way into things into the world.
A lot of the sublime is a function of your sensitivity. You can recover that. It is not that your atrophied senses are forever like that. You can put yourself in these environments. You can go to the desert and you can walk through the desert and you can feel the emptiness and the silence and the lack of vegetation and let the environment inhabit you and your senses will awaken. You can go to a mountain. You can swim in the ocean. You can sit in your goddamn backyard and encounter it. Your senses are waiting to be awakened. If we took somebody who was a stock broker on Wall Street with the most atrophied senses you can imagine and we gave him a shot of LSD or peyote, suddenly it would all open up. He would have these experiences as well. The point is it is not dead. It is there. It is wanting to be awakened.
The ability to be sensitive, to feel things with a lot of intensity and to really be explorers, like curious explorers are key portals to the sublime. One of the great gifts of the human brain is that whatever we focus on tends to exclude other options. If we go toward drama and numbing out, it excludes other options for some period of time. If we move toward what we're curious about and heightening our sensitivity, those exclude the bad options. Power through a benevolent lens, sensitivity, and the sensual and the erotic are important. There is great hope for the book to not just educate people, but to transform them and to transform the way they interact with the world and each other.
As somebody who just finished a book by hand after seven years, the next book is being considered. There are two strains. It cannot be another book like this because heading into late 60s and there is not the energy. There was a stroke and it is not possible to put through it. It cannot be waited seven years because it is not known how much life is left. There cannot be another big project, but there is obsession with something that has to do with the invisible. How many things affect our lives that you cannot actually see and that are very powerful, but that if you could see, it would alter your experience.
We cannot see the future. We have no knowledge of the future. But things are happening right now in our present moment. Little trends that are going to create the future. And if we could somehow see them, if we could kind of crystallize them into some form, we would have this kind of knowledge of where we're headed and it would be very powerful. There are people in history who demonstrated a high ability to predict what was coming. They fascinate because they like to live outside of their time. We live in these abstract spaces where everything is symbolic to us. We just live in these abstract worlds and they are invisible and we are not aware of their influence on them. The goal is to make visible all of these things that you don't think about are affecting your life. It is a weird concept and there are detailed examples on pen and paper. It is going to be a shorter book and it is going to be about negative space about seeing what's not there as opposed to what's there, what's missing in the picture.
The other thing is toying with the idea of writing fiction because it would be an insane challenge. It would be using a different part of the brain. There is fascination with the tech world and how it is so misguided and where did it come from and where is it about humans that have created this kind of slightly monstrous
Robert Greene discusses his interest in the psychology of tech overlords and the origins of their thinking, which he finds very dangerous. He describes this form of thinking as very inchoate and nebulous, and is researching deep levels of alienation being birthed in the present moment through art, technology, and fiction.
Greene explains that fiction will give him the ability to go inside the minds of tech overlords in a way he can't do with non-fiction. He finds that what he wants to express about the dangerous world we're headed toward is more suited for fiction than non-fiction. He mentions two ideas he's toying with and hopes his life goes on long enough to create them.
Andrew Huberman expresses confidence that Greene will be around for a while due to doing all the right things, noting Greene is exceedingly sharp and kind in taking time to discuss the book. Huberman shares that ever since reading Mastery, Greene has been a real role model, and he identifies people to model components of his life and career after, even when specifics differ.
Huberman reveals he "apprenticed" himself to Greene without asking permission, describing Greene as a giant in the world. Greene responds humbly, acknowledging Huberman's light and thanking him for the opportunity to discuss the book.
The conversation closes with plans to get together soon, including a potential psychedelic journey together that won't be live streamed. Greene thanks Huberman for the opportunity, and Huberman thanks Greene for being an incredibly powerful and thoughtful writer.
Huberman directs listeners to show notes for links to Greene's work including his new book The Art of the Sublime. He encourages subscribing to the YouTube channel, following the podcast on Spotify and Apple, leaving up to five-star reviews, and checking out the sponsors mentioned throughout the episode.
Huberman is Huberman Lab on all social media platforms including Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where he discusses science and science-related tools. He promotes the Neural Network newsletter at hubermanlab.com, which is a zero-cost monthly newsletter including podcast summaries and protocols covering sleep optimization, dopamine optimization, deliberate cold exposure, and a foundational fitness protocol for cardiovascular and resistance training.
Huberman thanks listeners for joining the discussion with Robert Greene and expresses appreciation for their interest in science.
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