|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…
|
There is an emotion that stops time. That makes the ordinary world suddenly appear extraordinary. That shrinks the self to a more accurate size and expands everything else. That has been linked, in research study after research study, to greater creativity, generosity, humility, and life satisfaction. Scientists call it awe. Mystics have been cultivating it for millennia. And you can access it today — in ways more ordinary than you might expect.
Let me start with what it actually is.
Awe is the emotion that arises when you encounter something that is vast — physically, conceptually, or morally — and that challenges your existing mental frameworks. It is what you feel standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, looking up at a clear night sky far from any city light, watching a master musician disappear into their instrument, or reading a sentence that captures something you have felt but always lacked words for. The world appears to expand. Your sense of self temporarily contracts. And something in the quality of your attention shifts — from the narrow, task-focused beam of ordinary consciousness to something wider, more open, more genuinely present.
The problem in modern life is that the conditions for awe are systematically crowded out. The screen fills the visual field. The schedule fills the hours. The familiar routine fills the days. Awe requires exposure to the vast — and the architecture of ordinary modern life is designed around the immediately useful and the conveniently sized.
Understanding what awe actually does, and how to access it deliberately, is one of the most useful things I have come across in years of reading about human flourishing.
What the Research Is Showing
The scientific study of awe is still relatively young — the first major empirical framework was published by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt in 2003. But in the two decades since, the findings have been consistently striking.
A 2012 study by Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker found that awe-inducing experiences created a subjective sense of time expansion — people who had experienced awe felt they had more time available to them, were more patient, more willing to volunteer their time for others, and experienced higher life satisfaction. The emotion literally changed the felt experience of time.
Research by Paul Piff and colleagues at UC Berkeley found that awe reliably induced what they called the small-self effect — a reduction in self-focused thinking, a loosening of the preoccupation with personal concerns, and an increased sense of connection to something larger. People who had just experienced awe were measurably more generous, more ethical, and more prosocial in their subsequent behavior.
Perhaps most practically relevant for daily life: a 2015 study found that regular experiences of awe were associated with lower levels of inflammatory cytokines — markers of chronic inflammation linked to depression, anxiety, and a range of physical health problems. Awe, experienced regularly, appears to have a direct anti-inflammatory effect on the body. The emotion is physiologically beneficial in ways that go well beyond its felt quality.
And a 2021 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who took regular “awe walks” — brief, twenty-minute walks taken with the deliberate intention of seeking out what is vast and wondrous in the immediate environment — reported significantly higher levels of positive emotion, lower levels of distress, and greater sense of connection to others than those who took regular walks without this orientation.
Twenty minutes. A walk. A different quality of attention. Measurable changes in emotion, inflammation, social connection, and life satisfaction.
What the Wisdom Traditions Already Knew
Every major spiritual tradition has built the cultivation of awe into its practice. The convergence is remarkable and worth sitting with.
The Jewish concept of yirat Hashem — often translated as fear of God but more accurately rendered as awe before the divine — is positioned in the tradition as the beginning of wisdom. Awe is the epistemic posture that makes genuine learning possible: the recognition that what is real exceeds what you currently understand, and that your frameworks are always partial. The Psalms return again and again to this quality — the combination of wonder and humility before what is vast and real and beyond full comprehension.
The Buddhist concept of shoshin — beginner’s mind — is essentially awe directed at the ordinary. The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. The willingness to see what is actually here, rather than what your categories tell you should be here, is the awe orientation applied to everyday experience. Every morning is the first morning. Every person is encountered as if for the first time.
The Christian mystical tradition, from Meister Eckhart to Thomas Merton to Teilhard de Chardin, returns persistently to what they called the sense of the sacred in ordinary things — the capacity to perceive the extraordinary depth of what appears, on the surface, to be simply a stone, a tree, a human face. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of the world being charged with the grandeur of God. The mystical sensibility is, at its core, a trained capacity for awe directed at the immediate.
Albert Einstein said: The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. One of the greatest scientific minds of the twentieth century identifying awe as the precondition for all genuine discovery.
Multiple Doors Into Awe
What I find most useful about the awe research is the discovery that awe is accessible through many different channels — and that the channel matters less than the quality of attention brought to it. Here are several worth experimenting with.
The natural world. This is the most reliably powerful trigger for most people. The night sky, the ocean, old-growth forest, mountains, the movement of weather across a landscape. These environments consistently produce the vastness and the framework-challenging quality that awe requires. Even in urban environments, the quality of dawn light on buildings, the scale of a city viewed from height, the particular sound of rain — these carry the same invitation if you bring the right attention.
Great art and music. The experience of encountering a work of art or music that exceeds your current understanding — that says something true in a way that lands like revelation, that produces the particular sensation of the hairs rising on your arms or the catch in your throat — is awe in its most accessible everyday form. Keltner calls this aesthetic awe, and it is available in concert halls, in great books, in well-made films, in visual art that stops you in front of it.
Human excellence and virtue. Witnessing someone do something extraordinarily well — a master craftsperson, a gifted teacher, an athlete at the edge of what human bodies can do — produces what researchers call moral awe. Similarly, witnessing profound acts of courage, sacrifice, or compassion produces what Haidt called elevation — a form of awe directed at human goodness that both inspires and expands the capacity for your own.
Ideas and understanding. The moment of genuine comprehension — when a concept suddenly clicks into place and you can see something you could see before — has the structure of awe. When the scale of geological time lands. When the implications of quantum mechanics actually register. When a philosophical argument opens a new way of seeing that reorganizes everything you thought you knew. Intellectual awe is real, accessible, and available in books, lectures, and long conversations with genuinely curious people.
The miniature and the microscopic. Awe is typically associated with vastness — but researchers have found that it can also be triggered by the intricate and the impossibly small. The structure of a snowflake. The complexity of a single cell. The mathematical precision of a nautilus shell. The fact that the atoms in your body were forged in the cores of long-dead stars. The very small, fully attended to, reveals the same inexhaustible depth as the very large.
The Practical Invitation
Here is what strikes me most about the awe research.
The emotion that produces the small-self effect, that reduces inflammation, that expands the felt sense of time, that makes people more generous and more connected — is freely available. It requires a quality of attention, a willingness to slow down enough to actually encounter what is here, a deliberate choice to seek out what is vast and wondrous rather than what is merely convenient and efficient.
The awe walk is twenty minutes. The night sky is always there if you step outside and look up. The great piece of music is a playlist away. The idea that reorganizes your worldview is in the book you have been meaning to read.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
The grandeur is already there. The question is only whether you are bringing the attention that allows you to receive it. Start with twenty minutes and a willingness to be surprised by what is already present.
Try This Today
- The awe walk. Take a twenty-minute walk today with the sole intention of seeking out what is vast, wondrous, or surprising in your immediate environment. Bring your full attention. Leave the podcast at home. Let yourself be genuinely surprised.
- The night sky. Tonight, step outside for five minutes and look up. Let the scale of what you are seeing actually register. The light arriving at your eyes left its source years, centuries, or millennia ago. Stay with that long enough to feel it.
- The beginner’s mind experiment. Choose one familiar thing in your environment — a plant, a room, a face — and look at it as if for the first time. Spend two minutes seeing it without your categories. What is actually here?
- The awe playlist. Identify three pieces of music that have, at some point, produced the physical sensation of awe — the catch in the throat, the hairs on the arms. Play one of them today, with full attention and a single task: receive it.
- The vast idea. Find one idea today that genuinely exceeds your current understanding — in a book, a lecture, a conversation. Sit with the discomfort of the partial understanding rather than rushing past it to something more manageable. The edge of understanding is where awe lives.
Keep Going
- Your Brain Is Lying to You Right Now — And Understanding Why Will Change Everything
- The Four Immeasurables: Metta, Karuna, Mudita, Upekkha
- The Forest Monk Who Saw Through Everything
- Everything You Need to Know About Dzogchen
- Your Brain Is a Gratitude Machine
- How to Harness the Power of the Tao