The Ultimate Source of Awe

Do yourself a favor.  On the next clear moonless night get in your car and drive.  Drive out of the city or the suburbs where you most likely live and find a dark patch of sky. Maybe it’s in a nearby park, or natural area, or farm, or a little-used country road.  Get out of your car…and look up.   If you’re like most people, as you gaze upon a star-filled sky, you will start to feel something that is rare, unique, and primal.  You may feel like you’re in the presence of something so vast that you can’t fully comprehend its size and complexity.  A bit of fear or anxiety washes over you. You feel diminished in its presence. In that moment, you might get a sense that you are connected to everything around you.  That feeling – that sensation – is awe.

The study of awe was once limited to philosophers and theologians. The experience was associated with the divine and inspired the faithful to worship. The idea of a god or a supreme being that created the heavens is too much for mere humans to fully grasp.  God is ineffable, too great or extreme to put into words, and awe is our reaction to that condition. According to the teachings of theologian and poet Archbishop Stylianos, it is the “ineffability of God that is expressed in awe and leads to worship….  Awe is the product of knowing just enough to fathom all that we would like to know but do not” (Kepreotes, 2020 p.107). 

This inability to comprehend what we are perceiving is fundamental to the experience of awe and creates a knowledge gap that leads some to religion and others to science. Whether one approaches the experience through spirituality or science, one thing is clear.  Awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways. In recent years, psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, and other scientists have begun to give the experience of awe significant attention.  It is fair to say that in the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of research on awe. 

What is Awe?

According to Kelter and Haidt (2003), awe lies in the “upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear” (p. 297). They note that there are two primary components of awe: vastness and accommodation.  Vastness is the sense that we are in the presence of something much larger than ourselves.  This feeling can result from differences in physical size, or other sources such as immense beauty, intellect, fame, power, or prestige. Accommodation is the need to try to make sense of what we are experiencing – the need to try to create some intellectual framework for the encounter.  Awe happens when we experience something that is so big, so beautiful, so powerful, or inspiring that we just can’t wrap our heads around it.  It humbles us.  It makes us feel small.

Awe is described by psychologists as a self-transcendent emotion.   In the grip of awe, we begin to lose our self-awareness.  We experience unity with other people and our surroundings and the boundaries between our sense of self and the universe dissolve.   These feelings are experienced along a spectrum of intensity, from the routine such as getting lost in a symphony or a good book, “to the intense and potentially transformative.” (Yaden, et.al, 2017  p. 143)

When we experience awe, we are more prone to a plethora of positive emotional, physiological, and social changes.  Studies have demonstrated positive relationships between awe and pro-social behaviors such as increased empathy, gratitude, and attention to others.   Feelings of altruism and connectedness to other people and the environment figure prominently in descriptions of awe.   It has also been shown to decrease stress and boost creativity. In yet another study, subjects who experienced feelings of awe subsequently demonstrated more ethical and generous behavior (Marchant, 2017).  Awe even produces physical sensations including chills, goosebumps, and facial expressions such as wide eyes and slacked jaws.

Awe and a star-filled sky

Many experiences can generate awe. Scenic vistas, symphonies, paintings, grand architecture, and the birth of a child are commonly cited sources of the emotion.  But perhaps the most common and accessible source of awe is the stars.  What more compelling source of awe is there than a star-filled sky?  There is nothing more vast. Nothing can make you feel less significant or more humbled than gazing deeply into the night sky.

Sometimes I get so caught up in the process of astrophotography - locating and framing an object, getting a good polar alignment, focusing, autoguiding, troubleshooting equipment problems, capturing and stacking exposures, and post-processing – that I lose sight of what it is that I’m actually imaging.  In those moments, the nebula or galaxy is just a collection of pixels on my computer screen.  Then all of a sudden it hits me that these beautiful structures are really out there. Giant colorful clouds of gas and dust, glimmering spirals of a trillion stars, thousands or millions of light years away. Each of the bright little specks on my screen is a star, a sun.  My life, my problems, seem incomparably small.  I am humbled.  As it turns out, this sense of a “small self” is a fundamental and important element of awe. 

In 1926, Henry Beston (1928, p.173) eloquently captured this feeling as he gazed upon the night sky from his small cottage on the dunes of Cape Cod. 

“When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze.  For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars – pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.”

The Overview Effect Courtesy: Planetary Collective

Not surprisingly, people who directly experience the vastness of space almost always encounter intense feelings of awe. Astronauts often talk about the life changing impact of seeing earth from space. Common features of the experience include a feeling of reverence for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment. The reaction is so common, that NASA has given it a name: the overview effect.  There are many beautiful and profound descriptions of this experience, but one of my favorites is from Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell. During an interview with People Magazine in 1974 he described the experience this way:

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

Perhaps there is no more profound expression of this feeling than the words written by Carl Sagan in The Pale Blue Dot (Sagan, 1997, p.6).  Sagan was inspired by an image taken by Voyager 1 on Valentines day 1990. As the spacecraft was speeding past Saturn, it turned its camera toward earth for one last image of our planet. The image shows earth as a tiny speck, a fraction of a pixel, floating in a sunbeam.  The sense of insignificance captured by Sagan’s words, the feeling of connection among all of earth’s inhabitants, the altruism in his plea for more kindness is quintessential awe.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot…. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves… It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

These expressions epitomize the feelings, the sensation, we experience when awed by the vastness, beauty, and grandeur of space.  Whether you’re staring at a starry sky from your backyard, orbiting earth, or gazing at a pale blue dot, seeing your life, your experience, and your planet within in the context and scale of the universe can have profound effects.

Credit: Dennis di Cicco / Sky & Telescope

A few years ago, I woke early on a warm, dark summer morning, along with my wife and two of her teenage kids.  We piled into the Jeep and drove north on I-25 from Fort Collins to Casper, Wyoming.    After stopping for a quick breakfast and some snacks, we headed to a parking lot just north of town.  There were already several hundred people there.  Casper was busy that day, because at 11:43 am, the city would be darkened by the shadow of the moon.   For 146 seconds, the “Great American Eclipse” of 2017 would immerse us all in late morning darkness.  As more and more of the sun disappeared, I viewed the event as a curiosity.  I was observing the changes in a relatively straight forward, rational way. I looked around as the air cooled.  The shadows changed; colors were different; birds started singing.  I watched through my small refractor as the dark crescent blocked more and more of the sun’s surface.  But when totality arrived and the last flash of the sun disappeared behind the moon, I was transfixed.  What was rational only a few seconds before became purely emotional.  A collective cheer, almost a primal howl, rose from the crowd. I remember feeling chilled.  But the feeling did not come from the cool air, rather it came from a purely emotional place.  I had goose bumps. My breaths were shallow. I had a huge grin the entire time.  There was a sense of happiness, excitement, joy, astonishment and a little anxiety.  I looked around at the crowd of people and felt an immediate connection to each of them.  We were all experiencing this surreal event together.  We looked at total strangers and smiled, we hugged.  I had set up my equipment to take pictures of the event, but for more than a minute of totality, I completely forgot about my camera.  I was mesmerized by the experience.  This was pure awe at work. 

I will never forget that day.  For me, as a budding amateur astronomer, there was before the eclipse and after. My passion grew. My need to understand the universe on a deeper level intensified, and it made my work protecting night skies feel even more urgent.  Within a few months, I bought my first “real” telescope and began capturing the beauty of the cosmos.  This is the power of awe. It can transform lives. 

With light pollution increasing at a rate of nearly 2 percent per year, dark, star-filled night skies are getting harder to find, utterly destroying opportunities to experience awe.   As a result, all of the positive physical, psychological, and social benefits of experiencing this profound emotion seem to be in short supply.  It’s clear to me, here on the day before the 2020 presidential election, that feelings of empathy, altruism, compassion, and connectedness are sadly lacking in our country.   Maybe, just maybe, protecting and restoring night skies can help.  Keep coming back to this site to find out what you can do to protect the night sky and bring back opportunities to experience this ultimate source of awe.

References:

Beston, H. (1928). The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Pushkin Press.

Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition & Emotion, 17(2), 297. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1080/02699930302297

Kepreotes, D. (2020). Divine Ineffability and Human Awe--Key Components in the Theological Teaching of Archbishop Stylianos. Phronema, 35(1), 97–113.

Marchant, J. (2017). Awesome awe: The overused superlative is truly apt for an emotion that gives us superpowers. New Scientist, 235(3136), 32. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079(17)31473-2

People Staff, (April 08, 1974) Edgar Mitchell's Strange Voyage. Retrieved from: https://people.com/archive/edgar-mitchells-strange-voyage-vol-1-no-6/

Sagan, C. (1997). Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Ballantine Books.

Yaden, D. B., Haidt, J., Hood, R. W., Vago, D. R., & Newberg, A. B. (2017). The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience. Review of General Psychology, 21(2), 143–160. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000102