Mother’s Dreams

This tiny book, Japanese Haiku
Series Three, could have been handed
to my mother aged eight

to keep in her waist pocket of her
cotton print dress that she could visit
the moonlight nightingale

between household chores and listen
to its line of sound as it whistled
over the millpond—

only mother never visited those
places, never knew anything was missing
from her dreams.

Awe Is an Important Emotion

Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates that awe is tied directly to feelings of expansiveness, transcendence, and connection.

From Keltner’s lab work, he concludes that people have become more individualistic, narcissistic, and materialistic. The way to address this is to actively seek experiences that nurture our hunger for awe.

[Keltner, 2016]

Practical Awe

We are inundated with news and social media about improving our happiness, health, and general well being. We don’t have time for it all. However, if we look for daily experiences of awe, we can take transformative steps towards these goals. In other words, rather than reading about ideas, experience awe, and gain the benefits.

[Keltner, 2016]

Awe Defined

Awe is a feeling in the presence of something vast that transcends my understanding of the world. Edmund Burke wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757, wherein he discusses how we experience awe in religious ritual, hearing thunder, being moved by music, and seeing repetitive patterns of light and dark.

[Keltner, 2016]

Awe in the Lab

In Keltner’s lab, they discover awe in daily life like seeing the leaves of a Ginkgo tree change from green to yellow, seeing the night sky when camping near a river, seeing a stranger give food to a homeless person, or seeing a child laugh just like their brother. Awe is elicited by nature, art, impressive individuals, or acts of great skill or virtue.

One study had participants create 20 I AM statements, some facing a T.rex skeleton in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology, and the others with their back to the skeleton. Those looking at the dinosaur were more likely to define themselves as part of the collective–a member of culture, species, university, or moral cause. “Awe embeds the individual self in a social identity.”

Another experiment had students gaze at a science building or the tallest grove of eucalyptus trees in North America, then walk towards someone who drops some pens in an apparent accident. Those that looked at the trees picked up more pens. They also reported feeling less entitled and self-important.

One demonstration of awe improving wonder and curiosity is having people watch a short video of expansive images of Earth and then finding themselves coming up with more original examples when naming things in a category, such as furniture. They also find greater interest in abstract paintings and persist longer on difficult puzzles.

[Keltner, 2016]

References

Keltner, D. (2016, May 12). Why Do We Feel Awe? Retrieved July 24, 2019, from Greater Good website: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_do_we_feel_awe