Access the Sublime & Live Your Best Life | Robert Greene

When people ask, “What am I meant to do?” I think they usually knew once. Something lit them up as children—sports, sounds, words, making things—but parents, teachers, and career expectations buried that original signal.

Robert Greene joins me to talk about The Law of the Sublime. I’ve long admired Mastery, but this asks a different question: how can ordinary life feel richer, stranger, more alive—not merely more successful?

Our minds create a familiar enclosure of routines, labels, uses, ego, and old emotional responses. The sublime jolts you beyond it. It can be unsettling because it is unfamiliar, but it brings freshness and intensity.

Can we cultivate that in daily life, or does it require a major disruption—psychedelics, illness, travel, some radical shift in perception?

Both can open the door. Drugs affected me deeply when I was young, and my stroke brought that feeling back literally. From a hospital bed, sky, birds, wind in trees—everything looked bizarre and beautiful. Later I realized my small backyard contained enough life to begin again.

A cup stops being merely useful when you attend to its shape, color, material, its odd presence. Your body is astonishing too: immense evolutionary history, repairing itself without instruction. These are little miracles if you notice them.

Gurdjieff called it self-remembering. Look at a flower or vase and tell yourself: I am here; I will retain this. Your mind runs away almost immediately, revealing how often we move half-asleep. Practice and meditation can make the ordinary vivid again.

Our nervous systems edit stable input away, but sustained attention can shift perception. I don’t mean assigning grand significance to every coffee mug. I think of old California fence lines—wire meeting weathered wood can hold me for ages. Awe changes scale: we can slow into detail or widen out with the clouds.

This is not inventing nonsense. It is recovering what the brain screens out so we can function. Cézanne didn’t just see “tree”; he saw that particular tree—fruit, sun, changing life. Fuller seeing is beautiful, not crazy.

Childhood felt immense partly because there was room between thoughts. Now attention is splintered, especially under the Instagram rhythm. Nabokov tried to recover childhood as an inward flow, where time is not outside you to measure but something you inhabit.

Near-death accounts suggest the usual structures—ego, social pressure, linear time—can loosen. They are not uniformly pleasant, but some people feel liberation or ecstasy. Time is far more pliable in experience than clocks suggest.

Aquariums do something related for me. Fish, octopuses, and waves have constraints, but you cannot truly predict or control them, so expectation releases. Encountering another species’ time world is thrilling.

The woman octopus in My Octopus Teacher gave that man a different sense of time through her short life, injury, recovery, eggs, and death. Try it with a dog or insect: how does its world move?

Technology pins us to anticipation, novelty, and dopamine updates. Even modest boundaries—leaving the phone elsewhere, sleeping without it, delaying the first check—can change a day’s texture.

That programming serves somebody’s interests. Fragmented attention makes us easier to influence, and it starves mastery. Learning needs repetition, accumulation, new pathways forming. In that slower process, you shape your mind instead of living in a mental wasteland.

John Elway said the field eventually slowed down for him. That is mastery: years of immersion let you perceive patterns others miss. Flow in chess, science, painting, or music is close to the sublime because you are no longer trapped in your small, self-conscious ego.

We also talked about reporting experience versus having it. If you are composing the post while a concert, expedition, or observation happens, you may be using different circuits from the ones required to be fully there.

After my stroke, I wrote this book by hand because I could not type normally. I filled more than a hundred notebooks, revising and recopying before transcription. Handwriting forced another pace of thought; hand and brain have ancient ties. I became an ink fetishist—sepia, black, turquoise, red—but sepia kept winning.

Language channels consciousness too. We grasp an idea, see a point, follow a sequence. These bodily metaphors may limit what we can imagine. An intelligence with entirely different grammar might inhabit a different reality.

Returning to life’s task: if someone has lost touch with that early spark, where do they begin?

Dig like an archaeologist. Find early memories of excitement that belonged to you, before approval and instruction took over. Study what repels you too. Persistent frustration can say, “This path is not me.” Journal it, give it time, cut through the noise.

My stroke made me more emotional and empathetic. I began to trust sensation as a form of thought. The sublime stopped being an intellectual subject: a story had to resonate in me or it wasn’t right.

I can call the stroke a curse and shrink into bitterness, or treat it as a blessing that taught me transcendence in confinement. Not everyone can cross deserts or swim with dolphins. Everybody has a room, a window, a body, a patch of life nearby. The need to transcend is not an elite luxury.

Love belongs here too. Another person ceases to be an object and becomes an interior world you can feel toward. Falling in love means risk. Refusing all vulnerability is not safety; it is refusing a major human experience.

Religion once gave many people participation in something larger. I am not making a simple argument for organized belief, but science can restore wonder: the brain, evolution, fossils, distant worlds—spiritually powerful facts. Technology can reveal the cosmos; the danger is when it becomes a mirror for status and comparison.

Sensitivity is the practical key. Our senses evolved to connect us to surroundings, yet cities and screens dull them. Go to a desert, mountain, ocean—or sit in your backyard—and let the environment work on you.

I hear curiosity, sensitivity, and deliberate slowing as portals. We are pulled toward drama on one side and numbing on the other. Choosing what we attend to can help us walk a different path.

I still have to put my phone in a drawer; I’m not above temptation. But the world is trying to enter you all the time. Don’t seal yourself inside a little citadel.

And if we ever take that psychedelic trip, Andrew, we will not livestream it. We’ll just be there.