"He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,is as good as dead..."
~Albert Einstein
"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,but by the moments that take our breath away."

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This video was created by @JasonSilva and shot and
edited with my 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 three big
ideas:
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...
"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.”
"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..”
Our desire to understand brings exquisite pleasure... and feeds our
exploratory voyage, our scientific inquiry, our technological
development, and even our poetic self-regard..
More: online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703858404576214771893335998.html


2) The Stanford study that found that AWE is clinically good for you,
expanding perception of time, increasing compassion and empathy and
promoting well being:
More: theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/study-awe-inspiring-experiences-change-our-perception-of-time/260138/


3) Ross Andersen's rapturous meditation on the ontological awakening
of our psyches provided by the Hubble Space Telescope: "At first
glancing the Deep FIELD “one might mistake it for gemstones scattered
across black velvet, but a closer look reveals that each smudge of
light, 2,600 in all, is a galaxy dense with billions of star-fired
worlds, pinwheeling in deep time. … To that point, astronomy had imaged
objects only four billion light years away, and poorly at that. Here a
telescope reached 11 and a half billion light years into space and
delivered an image legible to the layman: an unprecedented expansion of
human vision."
More: lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=331