The Ecstatic States of America

The premise

The book began with a pun, but it became a proposition.

The United States was founded on a radical idea — that human beings could invent a new social reality through imagination. The Ecstatic States of America extends that impulse further. It asks: what if consciousness itself were a frontier? What if the next territory to be explored wasn't land, but experience?

America has always had a strange double identity. On one hand, it produced consumerism, spectacle, and distraction. On the other, it produced Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Burning Man, Silicon Valley, the Human Potential Movement, Esalen, psychedelics, jazz, Hollywood, and the Apollo missions. This book is speaking to that lineage.

This is a book about the America that dreams — not the America of elections and cable news.

The America of Whitman's barbaric yawp.
The America of Buckminster Fuller.
The America of NASA.
The America of Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly.
The America of the frontier — except the frontier has moved inward.

Illuminated manifesto poster: 'The book began with a pun, but it became a proposition' — Greek philosophers, Newton, Woodstock, Ginsberg at his typewriter, and the Emerald City on the horizon — From the manifesto

About the author

Jason Silva

Jason Silva is a filmmaker, philosopher, and Emmy-nominated host of National Geographic's Brain Games. His video series Shots of Awe — short philosophical espresso shots on creativity, consciousness, and the human condition — has reached hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide.

For over a decade he has worked as a keynote speaker and "performance philosopher," translating the ideas of Huxley, McKenna, Fuller, and the great ecstatic tradition into a language for the age of exponential technology. The Ecstatic States of America is his manifesto: a field guide, an atlas, and an invitation to a country that has no borders because it never needed any.

“The future is not a place. It is a state we choose — together.”

The Ecstatic States — of — America

The book began with a pun, but it became a proposition.

Dispatches from the Republic

Jason Silva