Highlights

  • How can we live the good life? One enlivened by joy and community and meaning, that brings us a sense of worth and belonging and strengthens the people and natural environments around us? (Location 95)
  • Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand. (Location 98)
  • 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. (Location 151)
  • 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. (Location 155)
  • awe is almost always nearby, and is a pathway to healing and growing in the face of the losses and traumas that are part of life. (Location 223)

SECTION I • • • A Science of Awe

ONE EIGHT WONDERS OF LIFE

  • emotions: They are brief feeling states accompanied by distinct thoughts, expressions, and physiology. (Location 270)
  • Awe, by contrast, seems to orient us to devote ourselves to things outside of our individual selves. (Location 294)
  • we defined awe as follows: Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. (Location 308)
  • Vastness can be challenging, unsettling, and destabilizing. In evoking awe, it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered. And so, in awe, we go in search of new forms of understanding. Awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life. (Location 314)
  • What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe? Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty, the first wonder of life in our taxonomy. (Location 360)
  • A second wonder of life is collective effervescence (Location 380)
  • we feel like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic “we.” (Location 382)
  • Visual design proved to be a fifth wonder of life. Buildings, terra-cotta warriors in China, dams, and paintings appeared in stories of awe from around the world. (Location 412)
  • We can find awe, then, in eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany. (Location 451)
  • It also merits considering what was not mentioned in stories of awe from around the world. Money didn’t figure into awe, except in a couple of instances in which people had been cheated out of life savings. No one mentioned their laptop, Facebook, Apple Watch, or smartphone. Nor did anyone mention consumer purchases, like their new Nikes, Tesla, Gucci bag, or Montblanc pen. Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition, and status signaling—a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred. (Location 456)
  • people experience awe two to three times a week. (Location 540)
  • 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). (Location 568)

TWO AWE INSIDE OUT How Awe Transforms Our Relation to the World

  • During fear, our mind is attuned to danger. Each emotion is a lens through which we see the world. (Location 596)
  • What exactly vanishes during awe? Aldous Huxley called it “the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show” in making sense of what disappeared during his experiences with mescaline. This is a pretty good approximation of how psychological science makes sense of the default self. This self, one of many that makes up who you are, is focused on how you are distinct from others, independent, in control, and oriented toward competitive advantage. It has been amplified by the rise of individualism and materialism, and no doubt was less prominent during other time periods (e.g., in Indigenous cultures thousands of years ago). Today, this default self keeps you on track in achieving your goals and urges you to rise in the ranks in the world, all essential to your survival and thriving. (Location 629)
  • study from Japan, one group of participants watched videos of awe-inducing nature (footage of mountains, ravines, skies, and animals from BBC’s Planet Earth). Other participants viewed more threat-filled awe videos of tornadoes, volcanoes, lightning, and violent storms. Both led to reduced activation in the DMN. This finding would suggest that when we experience awe, regions of the brain that are associated with the excesses of the ego, including self-criticism, anxiety, and even depression, quiet down. (Location 677)
  • It is worth noting now that sources of mystical awe—meditation, prayer, and psilocybin—also reduce activation in the DMN. The same is likely true of other wonders of life. (Location 684)
  • It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained. (Location 712)
  • Laboratory studies have captured how awe leads to more rigorous thought. (Location 720)

THREE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL

  • Within the science of emotion that Darwin and James helped found, the tears, chills, and whoas offer clues to the origins of awe in our mammalian evolution, revealing its primordial meaning, its elemental qualities, before language and symbolic acts of culture. (Location 782)
  • Tears, then, arise when we perceive vast things that unite us into community. (Location 812)
  • As children get older, they shift to tearing up when feeling small and lacking agency vis-à-vis forms of authority. (Location 817)
  • At this stage, our tears arrive when we feel small in relation to the vast forces of local culture—peers, parents, teachers, coaches, and other adults. The embrace we seek is in the acceptance of others within our culture, in particular our peers. (Location 819)