Awe, and What It Asks
A woman I know stood on a ridge in the Sierra at two in the morning, in October, waiting for a meteor shower that never really came. What came instead was the sky. She had seen stars before. She had not seen that — the whole sweep of it, the dust lane of the galaxy running edge to edge, so much light that the granite underfoot had shadows. She told me later that she sat down. Not out of reverence. Her legs stopped holding her.
She is not a religious person and she has never known what to do with that night. It did not fit anything. It has not stopped mattering.
Here is a second one, and it is not the same. A man finishes work late, comes into his own kitchen, and stands there a moment with the light on and the house quiet. Nothing has happened. Nothing is vast. But he is of this — the room, the people asleep above him, the town, the long chain of ordinary mornings that made all of it. He is not visiting. He belongs here, and the belonging goes further out than the house.
Both of these are real. Both are the kind of thing people mean when they use the word spiritual, often with an apology attached, as though the word were slightly embarrassing. I want to say at the outset that I do not think it is embarrassing, that I do not think either experience is a mistake, and that I do not intend to explain them away. An account of these things that ends by dissolving them has not succeeded. It has changed the subject.
What I want to do instead is smaller and, I hope, more useful: to look at what such experiences ask of the person who has them. Because they do ask something. And what they ask turns out to be the same thing this book has been circling from a different direction.
The shock
Start with the ridge, because the shock is easier to see than the homecoming.
Two things have to be present. The first is obvious: something vast. Not necessarily large — vastness can be conceptual. A number can do it. So can a fact about time. But something whose scale is out of proportion to the frame you brought.
The second is the part that gets forgotten. The experience does not fit. Your existing way of holding the world will not take it in, and something has to give. Psychologists studying this call it a need for accommodation, which is a dry name for a violent thing: the machinery you use to make sense of your situation has met something it cannot process, and it must either enlarge or refuse.
This is why awe is not a nicer word for wonder, and certainly not for pleasure. The people who have studied it most carefully place it at the top of the range of pleasure and on the border of fear, and they are right. Awe is proximity to something that could overturn you. Every tradition that has taken it seriously has known this. The word that keeps recurring in the old accounts is not lovely. It is terrible.
Notice what this means. Awe is what it feels like when the world you are taking into account grows faster than your ability to hold it together. The scale of what is being asked of you outruns, for a moment, your capacity to answer it.
That is a description of an experience. It is also, more or less exactly, a description of the process this book calls moral — the enlargement of what you take into account, and the labor of staying coherent while it enlarges. Which suggests something I find hard to shake: that awe is not merely an emotion that sometimes accompanies moral growth. It may be what that growth feels like from the inside. Not a reward for widening. The proprioception of it.
And if that is right, then a prediction follows, and it is not a comfortable one.
Two doors out
If awe is the state of your frame being outrun, then there are exactly two ways the episode can end. The frame enlarges — you accommodate, and you come out of it holding more than you did. Or the frame refuses — you cannot take the thing in, so you wall it off, and you come out holding the same as before, only harder.
Both happen. We can now say so with more than anecdote. In one line of experiments, people brought into a state of awe became less certain of their political convictions, saw less distance between themselves and their opponents, and showed what the researchers called a kind of epistemic humility. In another, people in a state of awe conformed to a false majority opinion at markedly higher rates than people who were merely amused, or calm. Same emotion. Opposite exits.
Anyone who has spent time around religious communities will recognize both without needing the studies. The vastness that opens one person outward closes another down into certainty and a smaller circle. This is not a fact about religion. It is a fact about what happens when accommodation fails — and it fails often, because accommodation is hard, and the alternative is available, and the alternative feels like faithfulness.
So the shock does not determine the outcome. It only puts the question. What the experience asks is whether you will let it change the shape of what you take into account, or whether you will make it fit.
The other one, which is not the shock
Now the kitchen.
The man in the kitchen is not being overwhelmed. Nothing is failing to fit. That is exactly the point — he is experiencing fit. Where awe is the shock of the vast, this is the resolution of a kind of homelessness, and it does not require accommodation because nothing needs accommodating.
I want to insist on the distinction, because these two get run together constantly and they are not the same register. Awe un-homes you. Belonging is the opposite motion.
It is worth admitting that the science here is thinner than the science of awe. There is no agreed name for it. Researchers studying self-transcendent states have found that such experiences decompose into two components — a dissolving one, where the ordinary sense of being a bounded self loosens, and a relational one, a sense of connectedness with something beyond oneself. It is the second that the kitchen is about, and it can arrive with no dissolving at all, and no vastness either. Beyond that the literature mostly folds it into awe or into connectedness-to-nature and moves on. That is a gap, and I would rather name it than paper over it.
What I would say about it is this. Being at home in the world is not a discovery that the world was built for you. It is not, on my account, a claim about the universe’s intentions at all. It is the experience of standing in a relation that was already there — of having been made out of the thing you are standing in, rather than dropped into it from somewhere else. Whatever else is true, that part is not an illusion. You are continuous with what surrounds you, all the way down and all the way back. To feel it is not to be wrong.
And there is something the two registers share, which is why they belong in one essay. Both are experiences of the boundary between yourself and everything else turning out to be less solid, and less final, than you had been treating it.
Why nobody was ever argued into this
Here is a thing that has puzzled reformers for as long as there have been reformers.
You can give someone the argument. You can give them the argument well, and see them follow it, and watch them agree — and then watch nothing whatever change about what they care about. Anyone who has tried to move a room with a good case has felt this. The case lands. Nothing moves.
The traditions worked this out a very long time ago, and they built accordingly.
Consider what contemplative practice actually claims to do. Not one of the great traditions claims that sitting still will make you better at modeling the world. That is not the pitch. The pitch is that it changes what shows up as mattering — what grips, what holds attention, what you find yourself identified with. And the method is never argument. It is repetition, posture, attention, fasting, silence, ritual, pilgrimage, and a great deal of time.
That is not a primitive substitute for reasoning. It is the correct instrument for a different job.
Because there are two quite different pieces of machinery at work in any agent. One of them is in the business of what works — how things go, what follows from what, what will happen if you do this rather than that. The other is in the business of what matters — what is at stake, what would be a loss, what you would not do. These are not the same, and skill in the first does not touch the second. A person can learn the whole history of a place, every name and every date, and still be a visitor in it. Coming to know more about something is simply not the same operation as its coming to matter.
Argument is a tool of the first kind. It goes to work on the model of what works, where it is very good indeed, and it has almost no purchase on the second. Which is why the case lands and nothing moves — and why the traditions, which needed to move people and had centuries to find out what works, converged on practice instead.
I take this as a serious finding rather than a curiosity. If you want to change what a person takes into account, you will not do it by explaining. Stories do some of it. Shared work does more. Practice, sustained over years, does the most. The people who built the monasteries were not being unscientific. They were being empirical over a longer time horizon than we usually manage.
The part that must not be explained away
Now I have to be careful, because here is where accounts like mine usually go wrong.
If you ask people what happened to them in these experiences, they do not, on the whole, describe a feeling. They describe an encounter. Not “I felt profoundly moved about the world” but “I met something.” And what they report carries a particular kind of authority — it feels less like an emotion and more like finding out. Philosophers call this the noetic quality. It is the sense that the experience was not about your inner life at all, but about what is actually there.
This is the thing most often lost in translation, and losing it is not a small error. If you take an experience whose whole content is I encountered something real and re-describe it as you had a strong feeling, you have not offered an account of it. You have contradicted the person and called it an explanation.
The characteristic move goes like this: you felt united with everything, but what was actually happening was reduced activity in a particular brain network. And I want to be exact about why that move fails, because the reason is not politeness.
It fails because it requires a vantage point that nobody has.
To say what was actually happening is to claim a view from which the experience can be seen truly and the experiencer’s own account of it seen falsely — a position outside all positions, from which reality is read off directly and everyone’s report is checked against it. That is precisely the vantage this book denies exists. And the denial is not selective. It is denied to the mystic, and it is denied, in exactly the same breath and with exactly the same force, to the neuroscientist.
So I am not in a position to tell anyone what they met, or to tell them it was less than they took it to be. I have no standpoint from which that could be said.
And I would rather say the next part plainly than leave it to be inferred. I am not writing about this from outside it. I have had both of the experiences I began with — the ridge and the kitchen, in my own versions, more than once — and I have never wanted either of them explained to me. They are among the things I value most, and they have changed the direction of a life. Any account I give here has to leave them standing, or it is not an account I would accept either.
What I can say is something about the word made — because people hear it as a demotion, and it is not one.
The boundary between yourself and the “Other” is not a fact you discovered lying about in the world. It is drawn, and it could have been drawn otherwise, and people in different times and conditions have in fact drawn it very differently. In that sense it is made. But made is not the same as arbitrary, and it is certainly not the same as fictional. The world pushes back. Not every way of drawing the line survives contact with what is actually out there; most do not; the ones that endure do so because they answer to something that is not up to us. Between a fact read off the universe from nowhere, and a story we tell that could equally have been any other story, there is a third thing, and it is where nearly everything important actually lives.
Which means: when someone reports that they met something not themselves, and that it had a reality their own preferences had no vote on — I think they are reporting accurately. Something did push back. That is not the part I would question.
The part I would decline is only the last step, the one that says and therefore I have apprehended the ground of everything, from outside all vantages, finally. And I decline it for everyone at the table.
A question you can ask from inside
If all of that is right, then there is something practical to be had, and I think it is the most useful thing in this essay.
Traditions built around these experiences have produced, demonstrably, both of the outcomes I described earlier. The same lineage that extended concern to the stranger, the leper, the enemy, has also sealed itself against the heretic and burned the doubter. Both. Frequently the same century.
Most accounts from outside handle this by grading the whole enterprise — religion is on balance good, or on balance bad, tally up the wars against the hospitals. I have never found that exercise worth much, and more to the point, it is useless to anyone inside a tradition who wants to know how they are doing.
Here is a question that is not useless, and that requires no view from nowhere to ask:
Is this coherence bought by refusing to look at something that has already reached me?
That is the whole test. Notice what it does not ask. It does not ask whether your circle is the correct size, because I do not think there is a correct size and I would not know how to find out. It does not ask you to compare your tradition against some external standard of enlightenment. It asks only about your own process — whether the thing that holds your world together is being maintained by turning away from something that has already arrived at your door.
Not looking because you have not yet encountered it is not a failure; nobody encounters everything. Not looking because there is only so much of you and the day is finite is not a failure either; that is just being a creature. The failure is specific: something reached you, and taking it in would have cost you your settlement, and so you arranged not to see it.
Anyone can run that test, from inside anything, without leaving. And there is a second one that goes with it, because these experiences have a characteristic counterfeit.
The counterfeit is the feeling without the accommodation. An experience that delivers the sense of vast opening and asks nothing, changes nothing, costs nothing — the reward detached from the work. This is not a hypothetical; it is most of what is currently sold under the name. And the test for it is embarrassingly simple. Afterwards, is there anything you now take into account that you did not before? Did the circle move, or did you have an experience of it moving?
I ask this of myself and I do not always like the answer.
Whether the road arrives
Now to the thing I have been walking toward, and I want to handle it carefully, because it is the place where I differ from many of the people I most respect, and I would rather be clear than comfortable.
A great many people doing the work of making things better hold, in some form, that history is going somewhere in particular — that there is a convergence, a completion, a point at which the long labor arrives. The most beautiful modern version of this was written by a Jesuit paleontologist who saw the whole evolutionary story as a rising curve of complexity and consciousness, drawn forward toward a final unification which he did not treat as a distant abstraction but as a person, already present, already pulling.
I am not going to argue against that, and I want to say plainly why not, because “I decline to argue” can be a way of condescending and I do not mean it that way.
Whether there is a personal reality at the end of things is not a question my framework has any equipment to settle. It does not follow from anything I have said that there isn’t. I have no vantage from which to rule on it, and neither, I think, does anyone else — which is the same standard I applied a few pages ago, applied here.
But there are three places where I do differ, and they are real, and pretending otherwise would insult everyone.
The first is arrival. I do not think perfection is something the process is heading toward, and my reason is not that it is too far away. It is that a completed perfection would be the end of the very thing being valued. If you arrive — genuinely arrive, nothing further to take in, no further coherence to build — then growth is over. Adaptation is over. What you have at that point is not fulfillment but stasis. Everything this book calls moral is a motion, and a motion that has reached its destination has stopped being one.
So the refusal of a final arrival is not, on my account, a subtraction from hope. It is what keeps the thing you hoped for from being cancelled at the moment it succeeds.
The second is guarantee. I cannot promise that it comes right. The widening I have described is a direction that agents can take and often do; it is not a law that the universe enforces, and I know of nothing that ensures the long run bends the way we would want. That is a genuinely harder position than the alternative, and I do not offer it as an improvement in comfort. It is an increase in what is being asked of you.
The third follows from the second, and it is the one that actually changes conduct. If the arrival is assured, then present suffering is, in the final accounting, redeemed by what comes after. And a great deal of harm has been permitted, over a great many centuries, by people who believed exactly that and were therefore able to be patient with things that should not have been borne patiently.
I am not the first to say this, and I am not saying it from outside. The sharpest version of it I know was made by a Catholic philosopher against that same Jesuit, in his own church, in his own language — the charge being that if you make redemption an evolutionary inevitability, you have quietly erased the cross, the reality of evil, and the distance between the kingdom and the world as it is. Yes, he asked, but what Christ? That is not a secular objection. It is a family argument, and it has been going on a long time.
Which brings me to the thing I most want to say in this section.
The question of whether the path arrives is not a quarrel between religion and its critics. It is an argument the traditions have been having with themselves for sixteen centuries.
A fourth-century bishop of Nyssa concluded that because what the soul reaches toward is infinite, the reaching can never be completed — and that this is not a defect but the definition of the thing. The perfection of human nature, he wrote, consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness. And elsewhere, of the vision that is the whole aim: this truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. Later scholars gave the doctrine a name, and later theologians have argued about whether the endless ascent continues past the end of the world or resolves into a rest that is somehow also motion. They are arguing still.
The apophatic writers reached the same place by another road: any positive description of the ultimate is already a falsification, so what the mind does is not arrive but strip away, endlessly. A twentieth-century philosophical theology built a whole account in which the divine itself is unfinished — everlastingly enriched by what happens, never closed. A Sufi master in thirteenth-century Andalusia distinguished the journey to God, which ends, from the journey in God, which cannot, because the self-disclosures are infinite and never repeat. The Kabbalists set the reachable emanations against an infinite that is not reachable at all. And the great Vedanta schools split precisely here — one holding that liberation is a sudden and total realization, the other that the soul keeps its distinction in order to go on in endless devotion.
I am not claiming any of these people as allies. Several of them would have found my position appalling and would have been within their rights. I am pointing out that the question is old and it is internal, and that anyone who has been told the choice is between a religion that promises arrival and a secularism that promises nothing has been given a false description of the field.
What we can actually do together
So here is where I think we stand, those of us who are trying to make things better and who do not agree about the shape of the end.
We differ about whether the road arrives. That difference is real, I have not dissolved it, and I have named the one place where it changes what people do. I would rather have it in the open than smoothed over, and I do not expect it to be resolved — certainly not by me, and probably not in our lifetimes.
And here is what I notice, which seems to me more important than the disagreement.
Everyone reading this is trying to widen something. Everyone is trying to take more into account than the arrangement around them currently requires, and to hold it together while doing so, and to keep going when it would be easier to stop looking. Some of you understand that work as participation in something that is drawing you forward. I understand it as a direction that agents can take, with nothing underneath guaranteeing it. We are describing the same road and doing the same work on it.
That is not a compromise, and it is not politeness. It is the actual structure of the situation. Agreement about what the world is made of has never been the requirement for building something together; it has never once been available, and everything humans have ever built in common was built without it. What is required is a shared direction and honest dealing about where we differ — which is a much lower bar than metaphysical consensus and a much higher bar than tolerance.
I would go further. Your difference from me may be load-bearing. If the ones who hold an assured convergence can be tempted to patience with what should not be borne, then the ones who hold no guarantee can be tempted to despair, and to the exhaustion that comes of believing everything rests on you. Those two failure modes correct each other. A group containing both is steadier than a group containing either.
What it asks
Let me end where the ridge began.
The woman on the ridge was asked something that night, and she knows it, though she has never had the vocabulary for it. The vastness did not tell her anything. It did not deliver a message or settle a question. It enlarged what she had to hold, and then it left her with the work of holding it.
That is what these experiences ask, every time. Not belief. Not agreement. They ask whether you will let what you have met change the shape of what you take into account — knowing that the alternative is available, that it is easier, and that it will feel like loyalty.
And the answer is not given once. It is given at every scale you happen to occupy, which is the last thing I want to say.
You are asked it as a person, about the people immediately around you, in the ordinary daily way, mostly in small increments and mostly without anyone noticing. You are asked it as a member of every we you belong to — your family, your work, your congregation, your town — each of which has boundaries that are maintained, and each of which can buy its coherence honestly, by widening, or cheaply, by narrowing. You are asked it as one of a species that has now built a genuinely planetary set of connections and has not remotely built the coherence to match. We managed the wiring. The wiring is not the achievement. Being connected to everyone is not the same as taking everyone into account, and the gap between those two is roughly the whole of the work in front of us.
And we are asked it, now, about minds we are in the process of making, which will inherit whatever width of concern we manage to build into them and whatever narrowness we fail to notice.
None of this arrives anywhere. That is the part I would ask you to consider rather than mourn. There is no final version of us, no completed circle, no last enlargement after which the work is finished — and if there were, it would be the end of everything the work was for.
What there is instead is a direction, and company on it, and the next thing that has already reached you and is waiting to see whether you will look.
Look.
Sources & further reading
This essay engages its sources directly rather than through the book’s per-chapter endnotes. A citation-level pass is still owed.
Awe, and its two exits. Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17(2), 2003 — the two-component account, perceived vastness and a need for accommodation, on which this essay’s opening rests. For the fork: Daniel Stancato and Dacher Keltner, “Awe, ideological conviction, and perceptions of ideological opponents,” Emotion 21(1), on awe loosening conviction; and Claire Prade and Vassilis Saroglou, “Awe and social conformity,” Emotion 23(7), 2023, on awe raising conformity to a false majority. Amie Gordon and colleagues, “The dark side of the sublime,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2017), distinguish the threat-based variant. One caution worth passing on: the widely repeated link between awe and generosity is weaker than its popularity suggests, and Michiel van Elk and colleagues (Collabra 2(1), 2016) failed to replicate the “small self” mechanism behind it.
The second register. David Yaden, Jonathan Haidt, Ralph Hood, David Vago and Andrew Newberg, “The varieties of self-transcendent experience,” Review of General Psychology 21(2), 2017, for the decomposition of such experiences into a dissolving component and a relational one. The relational component is what this essay calls belonging. The psychology of emotion still has no settled name for it on its own, which is why the essay names the gap rather than filling it.
Perfection as endless growth. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (1978) — I.10 for “the perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness,” and II.239 for “this truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him.” Later scholarship named the doctrine epektasis, after the reaching-forward of Philippians 3:13; whether the ascent continues past the end of the world is argued still.
The unfinished divine. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929), Part V ch. II, where the consequent nature of God is “determined, incomplete, consequent, ‘everlasting,’ fully actual, and conscious.” The word incomplete is his.
The objection from inside. Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne (1966), ch. 5, for the charge that making redemption an evolutionary inevitability quietly erases the cross and the reality of evil. Ian Curran, “Theology, Evolution, and the Figural Imagination,” Irish Theological Quarterly 84(3), 2019, surveys the religious critics of Teilhard, who are more interesting than the secular ones.
Where naturalistic accounts go wrong. David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God (2013), on the habit of arguing against a very large powerful being and imagining one has addressed classical theism; Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (2000), for the distinction between showing a belief false and showing it unwarranted; Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (1957), for faith defined as the state of being ultimately concerned rather than as assent to propositions.
Within the framework: Foundations (perspectival realism — why there is no view from nowhere, for anyone); Standing, and the Widening Circle (standing as conferred rather than found); Coherent Pluralism (the thin center this essay arrives at from the other side); The Soft-Shell Hour (defended openness — what it costs to stay open when it would be safer not to).