Awe

On my visits to Pixar’s campus, Pete would take me to a sequestered room where he and his cocreator, Ronnie del Carmen, passed the hours drawing storyboards for Inside Out (a typical film is based on 70,000 to 120,000 storyboards). I had prepared for questions of a technical nature: What does the face look like during envy? What color best conveys disgust? Instead, we tackled questions about how emotions work. How does feeling shape thought? How do emotions guide our actions?

Like great novels and films so often do, Inside Out dramatizes two central insights about how emotions work. The first is this: emotions transform how we perceive the world—the “inside” of Inside Out. For example, studies find that if you are feeling fear, you will perceive more uncertainty in your romantic partnership, think it more likely you will die from a weird disease or terrorist attack, remember more readily harrowing moments from your teens, and detect more quickly an image of a spider on a computer screen. During fear, our mind is attuned to danger. Each emotion is a lens through which we see the world.

The “out” of Inside Out refers to how emotions animate action. In the film, it is the five emotions that move Riley to action. As eighteen-month-old Riley dodges an electrical outlet, Bill Hader’s voice of Fear narrates the action. When Riley plays hockey with sharpened elbow ferocity, Lewis Black’s Anger moves her forceful actions forward on the ice. Emotions are much more than fleeting states in the mind; they involve sequences of actions between individuals as they negotiate social relationships.

Let’s turn to the Inside Out of awe: How does awe transform how we see the world? And what actions do experiences of awe lead us to take upon encountering the vast mysteries of the eight wonders of life?

Something Larger Than the Self

Our experiences of awe seem ineffable, beyond words. But you might have noticed an irony at play: awe’s ineffability hasn’t stopped people from telling stories of awe in journaling, writing poems, singing, composing music, dancing, and turning to visual art and design to make sense of the sublime. In our narration of experiences of awe in these symbolic traditions, a clear motif emerges: our individual self gives way to the boundary-dissolving sense of being part of something much larger.

For hundreds of years, awe has been a central character in spiritual journaling, in which people write—to this day—about their encounters with the Divine. Fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich had sixteen visions of Jesus’s compassionate love. These stories of awe became Revelations of Divine Love, one of the first books written by a woman in the English language, and influential in shifting Christian theology toward an emphasis on a compassionate, love-based faith. Julian of Norwich used the phrase “I am nothing” throughout to express her feelings of awe in relation to Christ’s love.

Some of the most influential passages in nature writing in the global West, those of Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and Carson, portray the self as dissolving during experiences of natural awe. This dissolving of the self would transform early feminist Margaret Fuller, a central force in American transcendentalism, an editor at the influential magazine The Dial, and author of the bestselling treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century, all remarkable achievements during a deeply sexist time. At the age of twenty-one, Fuller had an experience of awe that began in the pews of a church and then continued outdoors under “sad clouds” and a cold blue sky:

I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all; and all was mine.

Awe freed Fuller of the very gendered self of the early nineteenth century to go in search of “the all,” a life of expanding freedom and empowerment.

The vanishing self, or “ego death,” is also at the heart of psychedelic experiences. In a story of awe, modern author Michael Pollan choked down a piece of a magic mushroom containing psilocybin, and then lay down with eyeshades on, listening to music. He saw his self, represented as a sheaf of papers, disappear::

a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its, and they were being scattered to the wind . . .

Pollan perceives his self to expand in ways fitting for a food writer married to a painter:

I looked and saw myself out there again, but this time spread over the landscape like paint, or butter, thinly coating a wide expanse of the world with a substance I recognized as me.

The personal always imbues the transcendent.