Awe

It was at around Christmas several years ago. I was away on a trip to different monasteries in west Switzerland with fellow students. We were in a Dominican monastery. It was snowing outside and it was freezing cold. The Romanesque church was only dimly lit and you could hear Gregorian songs—the acoustics were unparalleled. A feeling of reverence for something bigger and at the same time a feeling of comfort came over me.

Musical awe often arose in response to favorite rock groups, virtuosos, and, perhaps most poignantly, children, as in this story from Ireland:

When my seven-year-old daughter went in front of a couple hundred people and played the tin whistle with such determination and I was in awe of her courage to do that. She got an applause after her performance. We were attending her communion in the local church with her brothers and extended family. I felt nervous for her before her performance but was in awe at the way she did her performance so well and the way she handled herself at such a young age. I gave her a big hug and kiss after and told her she was great.

So much for booming electric guitars; give me a tin whistle any day.

Visual design proved to be a fifth wonder of life. Buildings, terra-cotta warriors in China, dams, and paintings appeared in stories of awe from around the world. So too did more surprising kinds of visual design, as in this example from South Africa:

I went to a customer factory for a machine inspection on a pharmaceutical sorting line. The machine’s capabilities were astounding—mind-blowing. I was in complete awe with the functionality, speed, and design of the machine. This happened roughly one year ago inside my customer’s factory and I was with my colleague (designer of the machine).

In his book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley suggested that the visual design of jewels opens our minds to the mystic’s way of perceiving the world. The awe we feel in relation to visual design allows us to locate ourselves within cultural systems that we may be part of. You may feel this in relation to Haussmann’s grand boulevards in Paris, a Mayan pyramid, the graffiti of Barcelona, and for some, a machine that sorts pills.

Stories of spiritual and religious awe were a sixth wonder of life. These weren’t as common as you might imagine, given our perennial search for nirvana, satori, bliss, or samadhi. Some experiences of mystical awe were classic conversion stories like that of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus or the Buddha under the bodhi tree, as in this example from Singapore:

When the Holy Spirit of God came upon me at a Life in the Spirit Seminar organized by the Catholic church. It was so powerful I could not stand and instantly collapsed but I was conscious of my surroundings and as my eyes were closed I could only see a very bright white light. Before the event I felt that the world had rejected me, that no one cared. When the event happened, I immediately felt lifted but most important of all I felt loved.

Other stories like this one from Canada mix mystical awe with sexual desire, a timeless blending of the sacred and the profane.

I met a man at our local farmers market who opened my eyes about meditation and the power of one’s body and emotions. With one touch of my shoulders he was able to see through me (in a sense). His presence and knowledge let me want to learn more. . . . Therefore I started to take meditation classes with him on a weekly basis. I learned so much about my body, mind, and spirit.

We shall see how often the sensations that arise during mystical awe, and all encounters with the wonders of life, involve touch, feeling embraced, a warm presence, and an awareness of being seen—clues, perhaps, to the deep origins of the emotion.

Stories of life and death, the seventh wonder of life, were common around the world. We are awestruck by how, in an instant, life comes out of the womb. And on the other end of the life-death cycle, when a person makes the transition from being a breathing physical being to some other form of existence, as I observed that night in watching Rolf die. Here is a cycle-of-life narrative from Indonesia, revealing how in grief our minds turn to ideas about the ways the departed remains with us:

That time around six years ago at the Sardjito hospital in Yogyakarta, me along with my father and other siblings waited for my mother who was sick, she had been hospitalized for one week and hadn’t regained consciousness. That time we were waiting until Mother met her maker, we were extremely heartbroken and sad at that time, however we realized that we shouldn’t drown in too much sorrow. Our future is still long. It was only after Mom left us that we realized how important is a mother and a wife, that now all of us have grown to appreciate and love our wives who are the mothers of our children.