When I ask Yuria about her experience, she explains it as a “nekyia,” a journey narrative that pays homage to book XI of Homer’s Odyssey (“nékys” means corpse in Ancient Greek). In most religions, Yuria explains, there are representations, in the form of stories, legends, poems, and myths, about journeys to the afterlife—Hades of ancient Greece, Sheol or hell in the Abrahamic traditions, Valhalla for the Norse, the bardo in Tibetan Buddhism, the Mictlán for the Indigenous Nahua, or Xibalbá for the Indigenous Maya. A nekyia journey, like a near-death experience, involves decay—the dissolution of the self; a distillation—celestial feelings of ascent found in surrender, chaos, and death; and growth—when we return to our waking lives. Understood within the science of mystical awe, nekyia are stories we tell to make sense of the inexplicable—what consciousness is like when we near death. Many religious and spiritual traditions, Yuria tells me, from rituals to iconography, grow from our collective effort to make sense of the mysteries of life.
Grounded in this idea, we can consider how religious and spiritual practices grow out of experiences of awe, in fact in ways we have already considered. Our awe-related vocalizations become sacred sounds, chanting, and music, allowing us to symbolize and share feelings about the Divine. With visual art—such as that of myriad Mesoamerican traditions—we represent the sacred geometries perceived during mystical awe. We tell symbolic stories of gods in awe-inspiring dance. Yoga offers a series of body postures that often manifest our physical expression of awe, and that bring us the bodily feeling of the Divine, as in this story of awe from twentieth-century yogi and mystic Gopi Krishna:
The illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring louder, I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt myself slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a halo of light. . . . I felt the point of consciousness that was myself growing wider, surrounded by waves of light. . . . I was now all consciousness, without any outline, without any idea of a corporeal appendage, without any feeling or sensation coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of light. . . . Bathed in light and in a state of exaltation and happiness impossible to describe.
Moving in unison becomes religious ceremony. Awe-related bowing, shaking, prostration, or looking to the sky give rise to ceremonial acts of reverence. Such rituals bring about a shared physiology, feeling, and attention to being part of something larger than the self. Muslims practicing the salat (the bowing performed five times a day) showed increased activation in the areas of the brain associated with acceptance, reflecting their sense of being connected to a Divine force that is larger than the self.
These many ways of representing mystical awe often come together in community spaces of awe-based intelligent design, of representations, symbols, and rituals that enable the collective experience of awe. The religiously inclined—about 60 percent of Americans—feel mystical awe at church, in prayer, when reading spiritual texts, while listening to sacred music, and when contemplating life and death. People who do not identify with a formal religion create their own “temples,” finding mystical awe in nature, or in a collective activity such as singing in a choir, or in dance, as Radha Agrawal does. Or in meditating or practicing yoga. Or in music, as Yumi Kendall does. Today, the Divine comes in many forms.
The shared experience of mystical awe transforms our individual selves in ways that make for stronger groups. For example, empirical studies involving thousands of participants find that feeling a sense of spiritual engagement is associated with increased well-being, a reduced likelihood of depression, and greater life expectancy. And greater humility, collaboration, sacrifice, and kindness that spread through groups. Groups that cultivated these tendencies through forms of religion, a new line of theorizing contends, fared better in competition with other tribes that did not, over the course of our evolution. More intelligent design.
The toxicities of communities that revolve around mystical awe are also well chronicled, and have given the world tribalism, genocide, and the subjugation of those outside of the favored group—historically women, people of color, and Indigenous peoples in more than ninety countries. Extractive and authoritarian forms of power, as well as charismatic sociopaths, often find revered places in communities of mystical awe. This is a truth Reverend Jen Bailey, Malcolm Clemens Young, and Yuria Celidwen know all too well, given their life stories and cultural backgrounds. They are composting religion in ways to allow for the decay of such tendencies, and to distill something essential to power the growth of beliefs and practices that unite rather than divide.
Psychedelic Awe
Bob Jesse used to be an engineer at Oracle. Shortly after arriving at UC Berkeley, I would learn over lunch that Bob had been transformed by experiences with entheogens: chemical substances, typically of plant origin and with deep origins in Indigenous cultures, that include, among many others, psilocybin, ayahuasca, peyote, and the synthesized drugs LSD, MDMA, and DMT. Knowing of my interest in awe, in 2004 Bob invited me to a retreat focusing on the scientific study of psychedelics.
My own psychedelic experiences were fast tracks to mystical awe, attempts to redeem William James’s “something really wild in the universe.” As if inspired by Emerson’s Harvard Divinity School speech, Rolf, our friends, and I threw ourselves into wonders of life while experiencing psychedelics, moving in a throbbing unison in the mosh pit of an Iggy Pop show, marveling at movements of grains of sand amid the loud roar of the Pacific, hearing the sounds of Mozart outdoors merge with the light and scent of eucalyptus trees, wandering through an exhibit of kindergarteners’ art in Golden Gate Park, witnessing a shorebird die from an algae infection and move through what we perceived to be the dance of death.
One experience of psychedelic awe stays in the cells of my body to this day, a trip Rolf and I made in our early twenties in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where Timothy Leary escaped to when on the run from the law. We went on a journey to “El Faro,” the lighthouse, a fitting direction for us: my mom taught Virginia Woolf’s transformative To the Lighthouse in her classroom. After taking a small boat to the isthmus on whose faraway point El Faro stood, we walked past dozens of red crabs dug into holes, each throwing out radiating balls of sand to mark its territory, which it defended with absurdly large claws, and we absorbed their strangeness and beauty. A fallen tree in the sand, perhaps a small manzanita, now gnarled driftwood, reached out to us, its smoothed branches leaning, yearning, seeking touch, intending and aware.
On the trail, we walked several miles with a precipitous view of the ocean to our left. The Pacific Ocean was illuminated. Magenta bougainvillea pulsated. Arriving at the lighthouse, sweaty and sun warmed, we stood inside in a small circular space with two windows peering out. The ocean’s horizon vanished into pure, refracting light. The room’s white walls glowed in the brilliant sun of Mexico. A roar of wind and waves surrounded us, echoing, hovering, moving, repeating. On the windowsill sat a piece of pink soap and some rusty nails.
What decayed for me that day was “the interfering neurotic, who . . . tries to run the show.” I experienced inexplicable and at times extraordinary sensations—a wind; the embracing, powerful sun; the porous boundaries between Rolf and me; entrained rhythms of breathing, side-by-side strides, and the regular crunching of footsteps. And a sublime laughter about life’s absurdities breaking into fragments of sound that vanished in the wind. The distilling of transcendent feelings of brotherhood.