Transcend by Kaufman Scott Barry

Author:Kaufman, Scott Barry [Kaufman, Scott Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

AWE: THE EVERYPERSON’S SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.

—Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (1962)

While the concepts of awe and wonder have a long history in philosophy and religion, James and Maslow helped bring them to psychology. Today, much of the contemporary investigation of awe stems from a 2003 paper, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” written by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt. 47 The authors argued that there are two main cognitive appraisals that are central to awe experiences: the perception of vastness and the struggle to mentally process the experience. Vastness need not be perceptual, such as seeing the Grand Canyon, but can also be conceptual, such as contemplating eternity. Awe is an unusual and complex emotion because it mixes emotions that don’t tend to go with each other, such as ecstasy and fear. 48

Studies conducted since that 2003 paper have linked awe with increased life satisfaction, 49 a feeling that there is more time available, 50 increased generosity and helping, 51 and decreased aggressive attitudes. 52 Awe can also affect the way we perceive our bodies, leading us to underestimate their size, 53 temporarily increase religious and spiritual feelings and actions, 54 and temporarily increase both supernatural belief and the tendency to perceive human agency in random events. 55

When my path crossed with Yaden’s in 2014 at the University of Pennsylvania, we bonded over mutual research interests and almost immediately collaborated on multiple projects, including the light triad research I presented in Chapter 5. Yaden observed that the experimental literature on awe lacked a robust state measure of awe. So to be as comprehensive as possible, we created a scale based on the various aspects of awe that have been described in the literature. 56 Along with our other collaborators on the project—Elizabeth Hyde, Andrea Gaggioli, Jua Wei Zhang, and Dacher Keltner—we asked participants, “Please take a few minutes to think about a particular time, fairly recently, when you felt intense awe,” and we had participants write a few paragraphs about their experience. 57 Here are some of the anonymous responses:

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