Awe and Awakening Community Consciousness
Awe occurs in a realm that is separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition… a realm beyond the profane that some would call sacred. -Dacher Keltner
Birth belongs to Spring. What is more Awe inspiring than Birth?
The energy of Spring is that of birth and renewal. We start to feel ready to get going on new projects, get outside, and get in shape for the activities we enjoy in the summer. We are feeling the energy of spring in our body/minds. Spring follows the rest of winter with birth and rapid growth. The slowing down and rest of winter is necessary to gather the energy needed to start all over again in the spring. This is as true for us as it is for acorns, daffodils, or hibernating bears. The acorns resting underground all winter, have gathered the energy they need to sprout and reach for the sun. There is excitement and hope in the air! The miracle of birth is unfolding all around us as the plants and animals begin the life cycle anew. What is more awe inspiring than birth?
The work of psychologist Dacher Keltner and others shows that Awe is as necessary as food, water, and love to developing the fullest of human potential and experience, individually and collectively. Awe is the result of “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” [i]
When our current understanding of the world is “transcended,” we find it “mind blowing.” Specifically, Dacher Keltner describes awe as an experience that bumps us out of our everyday awareness for a short time. When we are in that state, we lose track of our consciousness of a separate self and get swept up in the moment and grandeur of whatever is happening. We feel a connection to something much larger than ourselves. This can be an increased connection to the Divine, the magnificence of fellow humans, or Nature. As a result of experiencing awe, our brains have to do a little rewiring and our view of reality shifts to accommodate this new amazing, mind-blowing experience and integrate it into a new understanding of how the world works. The sudden knowing ourselves to be a small part of something much larger, and then having to reconfigure our world view as a result are the key aspects of awe.
In a recent “On Being” podcast with Dacher Keltner, he relayed a story of purposefully using awe to help himself work through grief after the death of his brother. Using his understanding of how awe triggers the feelings of connection to something much larger than our individual selves and the subsequent rewiring of the brain to accommodate that experience, he went looking for awe. Having studied awe for more than 20 years, he knew where to look. The story of his journey got me to wondering if we could use awe to develop a new collective consciousness around humanity’s connection to nature. To heal our fractured relationship and to know ourselves to be part of Nature in a new way. This is important because it is humanity’s view that we are separate from Nature, autonomous from Nature, and that human destiny is not absolutely tied to Nature’s destiny that is a fundamental, root aspect of our Ecological Crisis. Just as there is a potential energy, a magic, that daffodils must gather in the dark cold of winter before they can bloom again in the spring, awe can help us gather the potential energy and magic needed to imagine a regenerative, Thriving Life future on this planet.
Cultivate Awe to open consciousness to a Thriving Life Future.
Where to find Awe:
Dacher Keltner shares some of what he has learned over a lifetime of study in his new book, AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. He has organized the awe experiences of people from all over the world into Eight Wonders of Life:
o Other People: kindness, courage, strength, exceptional ability, overcoming hardship, and moral beauty
o Collective Effervescence: Weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, graduations, sports celebrations, funerals, concerts, political rallies…large groups getting excited and having fun together.
o Nature: cataclysmic events, extreme weather, night skies, beautiful/vast landscapes, amazing creatures, ancient trees…
o Music: transports us to new dimensions, listening alone or with others, singing/chanting together, professional or your kid’s recitals…
o Visual design: architecture, sculpture, painting, visual arts, amazing inventions…
o Spiritual, mystical or religious: feeling the presence of a Greater Power or the supernatural. He puts psilocybin experiences in this category.
o Life, Birth and death: witnessing the transitions into and out of this world.
o Epiphanies: sudden understandings of an essential truth about life… philosophical, scientific, mathematical, metaphysical… that transform your understanding of life in an instant.
Psychological, physiological and social effects of awe:
· Heart rate changes
· Goose bumps
· Tearing up
· A sense of having plenty of time
· A diminished sense of self importance
· Increased feelings of connectedness
· Increased social interaction and attention to welfare of others
· Increased ability for critical thinking
· Increased ethical decision-making
· Reduced self-centeredness
· Increased pro-social behavior
· Induced positive mood
· Decreased materialism
· Increased generosity
· Increased kindness
· Increased parasympathetic nervous system activity (rest, digest and repair)
“Awe occurs in a realm that is separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition… a realm beyond the profane that some would call sacred.” – Dacher Keltner
The list of effects of awe reads like the mission statement for a utopian society; one that I would like to live in. The idea that we can use our natural inclination and need for awe to purposefully expand our view of the world to increase connection, community with all life on earth, kindness, generosity with less materialism and self-centeredness is in itself awe inspiring!
Richard Powers, author of The Overstory, shared in an interview with Emergence Magazine about the awe experience with and ancient redwood tree that transformed his life, that it only takes “3.5% of a general population ideologically committed to the revolution to trigger transformation to the mainstream.” Now that I know what I am looking for with awe, I have hope that humanity can begin to shift our consciousness to give rise to a Thriving Life future. It seems doable….
