Awe

Fifteen years ago, my PhD students and I as well as other scientists around the world began to find awe in the lab. We charted this elusive emotion with new measures of the brain and body, physical responses like tears and piloerection (the contraction of small muscles surrounding hair follicles), sensations like the chills, and demonstrations of how awe transforms the ways we think and act. We have studied how we feel awe near great trees and in looking out at panoramic views. At sporting events, punk rock shows, and in the flowing effervescence of dance. In mystical experiences in prayer, meditation, yoga, and during psychedelic trips. In peak experiences with music, visual art, poetry, fiction, and drama. Science found awe, producing the first story of awe I will tell.

Before science, humans were making sense of awe in forms of culture. The second story we will hear, then, is how culture archives awe. This is a story of how we create music, visual art, religion, fiction, and film to share in experiences of awe, so that we may understand the vast mysteries we face together in a culture we call our own. Awe animates the stories, ceremonies, rituals, and visual designs of Indigenous peoples dating back tens of thousands of years. You might think of these as our first awe technologies. Awe structures the legends, myths, temples, and sacred texts of religions. It jumps out of paintings, photographs, and films, from Goya to Berlin street artists to the films of Miyazaki. And you can sense it in your body and feel its form in nearly every kind of music, from the sounds of the kora of West Africa to an Indian raga to Nicki Minaj.

Science tends toward generalization. Cultural forms aspire to idealization, and often some perfection of form. There is a third story of awe we need to hear, the personal and first-person. This became clear to me when I asked people this question and listened to the stories they told:

What is an experience of awe that you have had, when you encountered a vast mystery that transcends your understanding of the world?

If you have a spare moment, you might think of an awe story of your own.

The stories I heard people tell reveal timeless truths about awe. About the awe of watching a quadriplegic person, a former Olympic athlete, take his first steps while recovering from a devastating injury to his spine. Or being in the front row of a Coltrane concert when he was just breaking big. Or from a woman in the CIA at Abu Ghraib, who discovered her pacifism in looking at the currents of the Euphrates River.

Moved by these narratives, I gathered personal stories of awe from doctors, combat veterans, professional athletes, prisoners, writers, environmentalists, poets, musicians, artists, photographers, filmmakers, ministers, Indigenous scholars, spiritual pilgrims, midwives, and hospice workers. Stories about the courage of people who suffer with disease and how nature transforms the traumas of combat. Of how music allows us to find home in a strange land. About what it is like to nearly die, and how we make sense of such extraordinary experiences. These personal stories revealed first-person truths in a particularity, metaphor, image, and vernacular that science simply cannot capture, and that cultural forms only approximate.

These three stories of awe—the scientific, the cultural, and the personal—converge on an understanding of how we can find awe. Where do we find it? In response to what I will call the eight wonders of life, which include the strength, courage, and kindness of others; collective movement in actions like dance and sports; nature; music; art and visual design; mystical encounters; encountering life and death; and big ideas or epiphanies. These wonders are all around us, if we only pause for a moment and open our minds. There are so many opportunities for everyday awe.

How does awe transform us? By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.

Why awe? Because in our distal evolution as very social mammals, those individuals who united with others in awe-like patterns of behavior fared well in encounters with threats and the unknown. And because in the more proximal calculus of thriving in the present, awe brings us joy, meaning, and community, along with healthier bodies and more creative minds.

There is one last story of awe that led me to write this book, one I had no interest in being part of. That story began on a blustery January day in 2019.

On that day, I stepped off a handball court, sweaty and unburdened, having finished a tough game with my longtime partner, Isaac. I looked at my iPhone on my gym bag. Two texts.

From my brother’s wife, Kim:

Can you come here as fast as possible?

Fifteen minutes later from my mom:

It’s over. Rolf took the cocktail. He is leaving us.