And then our last year as an intact family, on our way to England, where our parents would part ways. Rolf and I at revered sites—the Alhambra, the Louvre, and Notre Dame—as teens, sneering and mocking, and on occasion solemn and moved.
As we looked at the slides, Rolf drifted in and out, and with an inviting finger asked for more. Before finally falling into a deep sleep, he observed: “We had fun.”
Fun, like awe, is one of several self-transcendent states, a space of emotions that transport us out of our self-focused, threat-oriented, and status quo mindset to a realm where we connect to something larger than the self. Joy, the feeling of being free, for the moment, of worldly concerns, is part of this space, as is ecstasy (or bliss), when we sense ourself to dissolve completely (in awe we remain aware, although faintly, of our selves). And fun, the mirth and lighthearted delight we feel when imagining alternative perspectives upon our mundane lives we so often take too seriously.
Gratitude is part of this transcendent realm of feeling, the reverence we feel for the gifts of life. I felt it acutely that day amid waves of sadness and anxiety, surveying those 1,372 slides. My parents had allowed my brother and me to wander, locating us in a world of wonders. Rolf and I had lived a brotherhood of awe.
Knowing now a bit more about the what of awe, where we find it, how it feels, and how it is part of a broader space of transcendent states, it is time to turn to how awe works. How does awe transform our minds, our sense of self, and our way of being in the world?
TWO AWE INSIDE OUT How Awe Transforms Our Relation to the World
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science.
• ALBERT EINSTEIN
A sense of wonder so indestructible it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strengths.
• RACHEL CARSON
On a bustling day in 2010, I was working in my office when I received a call from Pete Docter, whose film Up had just won an Academy Award. He was calling to ask if I would talk with his team about his next film. The main characters, he continued, would be five emotions inside the mind of Riley, an eleven-year-old girl. The film was tentatively titled Inside Out.
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.