Podcast Summary
Exploring the Power of Awe in Everyday Life: Cultivating awe by appreciating natural beauty and collective effervescence can have a positive impact on our well-being, reducing stress, increasing social cohesion, and improving immune system function. Awe is accessible to us all and can be practiced through simple strategies.
Finding awe in everyday life can transform your life by changing your sense of self and your relationship with the world. Awe is characterized by a profound capacity to wonder at the vast mysteries of life, and it is different from other primal emotions like fear. Awe can be experienced by exposure to natural beauty, sensations of collective effervescence, moral beauty, and more. Awe can promote positive psychological and physiological changes in your well-being, including reduced stress levels, increased social cohesion, and better immune system function. The book Awe, the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner offers eight simple strategies for mainlining awe in our everyday lives.
Awe, Morality, and Gratitude: The Interconnected Triad: Awe helps us feel connected to something larger than ourselves, promoting pro-social values and gratitude. Accessible through nature and music, it is foundational to morality and happiness.
Awe and morality are interconnected, with awe helping us realize that we are part of something larger than ourselves, such as meaningful groups and ecosystems. Awe quiets egoism and entitlement, and instead helps us feel connected to a larger purpose. This sense of collective and connectedness is foundational to morality. While the pro-social benefits of awe are robust, it doesn't guarantee that individuals won't remain self-centered or stuck in tribal silos. Awe can be accessed through various modalities, such as nature and music, and can help us appreciate and express gratitude for the people who give us things. Gratitude is central to the science of happiness and to our moral lives.
The Power of Experiencing Awe in Human Behavior: Experiencing awe can bring out the best in us, making us more cooperative and altruistic. It can be cultivated by exposing ourselves to beauty and mystery. However, misuse of awe can also have devastating effects.
Experiencing awe can activate the better angels of human nature. Research has shown that living in urban environments with more awe and beauty can make people more civil and cooperative. Experiencing awe at festivals or through psychedelic experiences can lead to altruistic tendencies that last for up to a year. However, awe can also be put to problematic uses, as seen in the Rwandan genocide. Awe is different from fear and beauty, and is characterized by encountering vast mysteries that one's current knowledge cannot explain. Experiencing awe can be cultivated in our lives, for example, by looking at art.
The Physiology of Awe and its Connection to Kindness and Togetherness: Feeling awe not only has a psychological impact but also a physiological one. The warmth in the chest, tears, and goosebumps all signify kindness, togetherness, and open-heartedness towards others.
Awe is not just about recognizing vast and mysterious things, it is also a physiological response in our bodies. The warm chest feeling of awe is due to the activation of the vagus nerve, which not only influences breathing, heart rate, and digestion but also correlates with feeling open to others, empathy, and kindness. Tears during moments of awe come from the lacrimal gland and signal pro-social kindness. Goosebumps during awe are a sign of togetherness and leaning into each other. Different physiological responses associated with horror show that goosebumps are distinct from shuddering. Spiritual traditions write about goosebumps during mystical experiences. Whitman recognized that our sense of goodness and awe is in the body.
Finding Awe: The Key to Happiness and Coping with Grief: Awe challenges us to interpret our deep experiences and finding awe in nature, moral beauty, collective activities, music, art, and contemplation can bring wonders back. Take 10 minutes a day to find awe and improve happiness and cope with grief.
Finding awe is the key to happiness and the good life, according to Dacher Keltner. 41% of Americans find the divine or what is part of their soul in nature. Awe challenges us to interpret our deep experiences, whether it's about divinity, God, soul or appreciation of evolution. Finding awe can give us a roadmap to cope with grief and bring wonders back, as there are eight realms where we can find awe: moral beauty of people and nature, collective stuff like sports or dance, music and art, contemplation and spiritual practice, and big ideas about life and death. Practically, readers can think about where they can find 10 minutes of awe a day.
Finding Purpose and Resilience through Awe: Awe experiences can help guide individuals towards their purpose and make them more resilient to stress. Reflecting on past experiences and seeking out new forms of awe can provide meaning in times of crisis.
The key to happiness is finding meaning and purpose in life, which can be discovered through experiences of awe. Awe can serve as a compass for life, guiding individuals towards their defining set of purposes and making them more resilient to stress. Awe can be found in various forms of beauty, especially the moral beauty and kindness of other people. Young people today may be experiencing a crisis of meaning given the current climate and pressures. It is important to reflect on experiences of awe and what they have taught us, as well as to explore different pathways to experience more awe in life.
The Power of Moral Beauty and Collective Effervescence.: Take time to reflect on personal examples of moral beauty and seek out culturally significant stories that inspire. Curate morally inspiring content, seek shared experiences, tap into collective humanity, and cultivate a sense of awe and wonder in life.
We are awestruck by moral beauty and deeply intuitive about the goodness of others. To operationalize this advice, reflect on personal examples of moral beauty and seek out culturally significant stories that inspire. In the digital age, we can curate our content to include morally inspiring stories and avoid getting caught in angry algorithms. Awe and collective effervescence are deep instincts that can be found in surprising ways, from yoga to chance contacts with others in public spaces. By seeking out and experiencing these moments together, we can tap into our collective humanity and cultivate a sense of awe and wonder in our lives.
The Power and Pitfalls of Collective Emotions: Balancing heart and head in our collective discourse around emotions is necessary to ensure that it serves the greater good, and connecting with nature can deepen our understanding and awe of the world.
Collective effervescence, or the sense of common cause that arises from shared experiences, can be a powerful force for human connection and positive emotions. However, it is important to remember that this tendency can also be turned towards the dark side, as seen in instances like Nazi rallies or violent sports events. Emotions like awe and gratitude are important, but relying solely on them as a moral compass can lead us into trouble. For this reason, it is important to approach collective discourse around emotion with both the heart and the head, in order to determine whether it is serving the greater good. Additionally, reconnecting with nature and our relationship to ecosystems can help us cultivate a deeper sense of awe and understanding of the world around us.
The Healing Powers of Nature and Music: Spending time in nature and listening to music daily can have significant health benefits, including reducing stress and increasing a sense of connection and identity. Incorporating natural environments and music into our daily lives can inspire awe and positively impact our overall well-being.
Spending time in nature has several health benefits like calming the immune system, cortisol, stress-related regions of the brain like the amygdala, increasing life expectancy and helping kids with their physical and mental robustness. Natural awe can be found in greening of cities, building parts back into urban areas, farmer's markets and local gardens. Music has a powerful impact on people's emotions and can create pleasant physical reactions like goosebumps or vibrations. Listening to music daily can be a source of awe, and it unites people into a sense of group, meaning, and identity. Chanting, coral features and expanding sounds in music can bring out awe and register in our bodies.
The Power of Awe in Visual Design and Personal Experiences: Awe can be found in the patterns of beautiful objects, nature, and moral beauty. Listening to music and practicing awe walks can help experience awe. Epiphanies can provide an understanding of life's purpose.
Visual design, including patterns found in art, craft, and even machines, can elicit awe in individuals. Awe can come from recognizing the interconnected, vast, and complicated patterns in beautiful objects or environments. It is not solely a religious emotion, as it can be found in encounters with moral beauty and nature. Emerson and William James emphasized the importance of finding spiritual awe in personal experiences rather than solely through religion. One way to experience awe is to listen to music that brings awe for one song a day. Practicing awe walking can also be beneficial. Epiphanies can help individuals understand the big point of existence.
Finding Mystical Experiences in Everyday Life: Whether it be through religion, nature, meditation, or grief, finding the primary goodness in life is a universal challenge. Rituals of grieving can keep loved ones alive in memory and generate awe, despite the pain they bring.
Mystical experiences can be found in any religion, through meditation or yoga, in beauty and nature, or even taking laughing gas. It's a challenge for people to find what's fundamentally primary and good about life. Americans often find it in nature, while others find it in things like coral singing, studying awe, and grieving a loved one's loss. Rituals of grieving are important for collectively reflecting over time, and reflecting on the life of a loved one who has passed can generate awe. Painful and hard as it may be, it brings the person's life into the present and keeps them alive in memory.
A Materialist Scientist's Spiritual Journey: Even those who identify as materialist scientists can benefit from exploring spirituality and being open to new experiences.
The speaker went on a journey to keep the memory of his lost companion alive and make sense of it. He had mystical experiences like feeling his voice in the sky and his hand on his back. He attended yoga and spiritual retreats, including one in India, which was a mind-blowing experience, where he meditated on different spiritual traditions and did walking meditations. Through the journey, he found his spirituality and saw the importance of being open-minded to it, even as a materialist scientist. The journey also took him to volunteering in prisons and hiking around Mont Blanc. At the end of the retreat, he had a deep walking meditation experience.
Understanding Epiphanies and Their Importance in Life: Epiphanies are sudden realizations that help us understand the fundamental truths of the world around us. They offer a humbling perspective on our identity, consciousness, and place in complicated systems like families, societies, and histories.
Epiphanies are sudden realizations that occur when our default expectations about the world or our life cannot explain what we see or think about. They are where you start to see the systems of life, like the ecosystem, religious system, or economic system. These big ideas, which we care about as individuals, help us open our minds to the compass. Epiphanies are essential as they provide us with more fundamental truths. Understanding the cause and effect of everything happening around us gives us the realization that our identity, consciousness, and strivings are parts of complicated systems such as families, neighborhoods, societies, and histories. This understanding is humbling as it makes us understand our place in the world.
Understanding Our Place in the World Can Empower Us: Taking a step back from our self-focused lives and cultivating a sense of awe towards the world around us can alleviate stress, depression, and anxiety, and help us to understand our place in the larger system of forces.
Our lives are part of a vast web of forces, and understanding this can make us feel humbled, free, and empowered. Simplistically, we are too self-focused, which is costing us and the world. Young people, especially, are too self-focused, which leads to depression, anxiety, self-harm, and eating issues. To counter this trend, we need to take breaks, get out into nature, and move towards the gifts of moral beauty. We need to cultivate awe to expand our understanding of the self and the world around us. By doing this, we can alleviate the pressure we feel and think beyond ourselves towards the broader system of forces we are a part of.