Spirituality of Aesthetics
Against Time
I hate the passage of time. Every time a vital moment ends and fades into the past it feels like a death of something beautiful. There are so many experiences in my life that were glorious and unique and have been utterly extinguished. In a just universe they would stay perfect and vital and experiential forever, a crystal of meaning and joy fixed in the firmament of eternity. Not crushed by the inevitable steamroller of linear time.
Of course they couldn’t have existed at all if time didn’t pass, which is one hell of a catch. So… a transcendent ability to touch those places forever is what we really want.1
I touched God once when I was on a lot of acid. I don’t much talk about it, because hearing about someone else’s acid trip is as tediously boring as hearing about someone else’s weird dream. But to sum up - for several moments I was touching every instance of myself throughout time that was equally high on acid. We all met briefly in the one true pure place that you can only reach when you’re blasted out of your mind. And I knew the purpose of life was to continue to reach this place regularly, to meet back with my past and future selves who were doing this too, in a communion through all time.
I knew this was fake, drugs don’t actually let you cross time, God doesn’t exist, and it was just a neat feeling. And yet the sense of revelation remained as an echo, and would come back to haunt me. In the good way.
Physics as Separate Magisterium
B-Theory of time proposes that all moments of time are equally real and existent, and the feeling that only the present exists is a psychological trick and not a matter of fact. Physics works either way (and might more strongly support B-Theory actually). My friend Matt argues that B-Theory resolves the problem of meaninglessness in life, because all the things you do are forever etched in place in the omni-existing universe. The more I live, the more sane this seems.
Now when I’m having an extremely high-emotionally-valent experience my feeling of all this being vanity is significantly reduced. I am not passing through a fleeting moment to be crushed to dust. I am creating an eternal crystallization of emotion and experience that solidifies into the material of existence itself. It is now fixed there, shining like a beacon of qualia for all of time. The me that stretches across all my living years is forever in touch with all of them. If ever our descendants2 find ways to touch things that are etched into past reality they will find a treasure trove of amazing, intense, beautiful experiences that I have placed there. A gift of feeling.
Even if they don’t, those crystals of burning experience lighten the timeline around them just for existing.
Not all of these experiences are good, per se. Some of them are jagged bouts of longing and despair and wrenching sadness. A few of incinerating rage. But they are never boring. Every time I create such a thing, I am adding value into the timeline. I leave the fabric of reality richer, more vibrant, more thrumming with life.
This makes a lot of the rest of life more tolerable. More worthwhile. We plod through the boring and tedious parts of life so that we can marshal the resources (both physical and psychological) that we need to launch another one of these valence-crystals into eternal existence. We hurt so we can get to the next such point. Strive for these things. Bring them into existence. It is good work. Some might say it is verging on Holy Work, making existence more beautiful for the sake of beauty itself. It is a belief in the spirituality of aesthetics itself. We strive for beautiful experiences because the aesthetics of beauty are literally the encapsulation of that which is good in the universe.
Future Perfect
I’m not sold on the idea that there is no separate self. But I do think one of the combined projects we as a species work on is the embedding of uncountable treasures of aesthetic experience into the eternal timeline.3 Implications:
More life is better. An ever-growing population means more humans to experience more joyous things and leave more crystals of beauty in the timeline. A humanity that overflows our planet and reaches out like a forest in full bloom to spread among the stars is uncountably good. Every life experiences some true majesty in it, and many trillions of humans can create so many of these.
More wealth is better. Wealth allows us to create more such experiences per year. It allows the creation of ever more intricate and esoteric experiences. It frees up more time from drudgery and misery.
More diversity is better. There are millions of ways to experience majesty, and no one human could create even a fraction of the possibilities. A huge diversity of humans pursuing a million ways to experience high-emotional-valency is needed to make sure the timeline has a dazzling array of experience.
No one can do everything.
Numbing yourself is bad.
Self-exploration is good.
Social connection is good.
Do things. Take some risks (not stupid ones). Explore.
But most of all, don’t feel bad about using some resources for the creation of beautiful experiences in your own life. You are also part of the human project. Over-optimizing for other goals, whether it be maximizing the population or wealth or QALYs, to the exclusion of experiencing any great majesty yourself, is legitimately bad. It’s losing sight of the purpose behind doing all those other things. Add your own gems of deep qualia to the timeline, even if it’s only a few. It’s what we’re here for.
And by “we” I mean “me.”
Including greatly-progressed versions of myself
It doesn’t escape my notice that this idea rests upon claims about the physical universe we can’t (yet) verify, which is a thing this sort of woo has in common with every single religion that’s ever been created. And also that this idea neatly allows me to find greater purpose in pursuing unique intense experiences, which is a thing I already value for its own sake. C’est la vie.
<3