Awe, and What It Asks
A woman stood on a ridge in the Sierra at two in the morning, in October, waiting for a meteor shower that never really showed up. What showed up instead was the sky. She’d 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 under her boots threw shadows. She sat down. Not out of reverence. Her legs just stopped holding her.
She isn’t religious, and she’s never known what to do with that night. It didn’t fit anything. It also hasn’t stopped mattering.
Here’s a second one, and it isn’t the same thing at all. A man gets home 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 upstairs, the town, the long chain of ordinary mornings that made all of it. He isn’t visiting. He belongs here, and the belonging reaches further out than the house does.
Both of these experiences are real. Both are the kind of thing people mean when they say spiritual, usually with a small apology attached, as though the word were a little embarrassing. So let me say up front that I don’t find it embarrassing, that I don’t think either experience is a mistake, and that I have no intention of explaining them away. An account of these things that ends by dissolving them hasn’t succeeded. It’s changed the subject.
What I want to do is smaller, and I hope more useful. I want to look at what these experiences ask of the person having them. Because they do ask something. And what they ask turns out to be the same thing this book has been circling all along, coming at it from a different side.
The shock
Start with the ridge, because the shock is easier to see than the homecoming is.
Two things have to be there. The first is obvious: something vast. Not necessarily big — vastness can be an idea. A number can do it. So can a fact about time. But something whose scale is wildly out of proportion to the frame you walked in with.
The second thing is the one people forget. It doesn’t fit. Whatever you normally use to hold the world together won’t take this in, and something has to give. Psychologists have a dry name for it — a need for accommodation — which undersells a fairly violent event. The machinery you use to make sense of your situation has run into something it can’t process. It either grows, or it refuses.
Which is why awe isn’t just a fancier word for wonder, and certainly not for pleasure. The people who’ve studied it most carefully put it at the very top of the range of pleasure and right on the border of fear, and I think they’re right. Awe is standing close to something that could knock you over. Every tradition that took it seriously knew this. The word that keeps turning up in the old accounts isn’t lovely. It’s terrible.
Notice what that means. Awe is what it feels like when the world you’re taking into account grows faster than your ability to hold it together. What’s being asked of you outruns, for a moment, your capacity to answer.
That’s a description of an experience. It’s also, almost word for word, a description of the thing this book calls moral — taking more into account, and doing the work of staying coherent while you do. Which points at something I can’t shake. Maybe awe isn’t just a feeling that sometimes shows up alongside moral growth. Maybe it’s what that growth feels like from the inside. Not a reward for widening. The sensation of it.
And if that’s right, something follows. It isn’t comfortable.
Two doors out
If awe is your frame being outrun, then there are exactly two ways the episode can end. Either the frame grows — you take the thing in, and you come out holding more than you did. Or the frame refuses. You can’t fit it, so you wall it off, and you come out holding exactly what you held before, only harder.
Both happen, and we can now say so with more than a hunch. In one set of experiments, people put into a state of awe became less sure of their political convictions, saw less distance between themselves and the people they disagreed with, and showed what the researchers called a kind of humility about what they knew. In another, people in a state of awe went along with a false majority opinion at noticeably higher rates than people who were simply amused, or calm. Same emotion. Opposite doors.
Anyone who’s spent time around religious communities will recognize both without needing a study. The same vastness that opens one person outward closes another one down into certainty and a smaller circle. That’s not a fact about religion. It’s a fact about what happens when the growing doesn’t happen — and it often doesn’t, because growing is hard, and the other door is right there, and going through it feels like loyalty.
So the shock doesn’t settle anything. It only asks. What it asks is whether you’ll let it change the shape of what you take into account, or whether you’ll trim it until it fits what you already had.
The other one, which is not the shock
Now the kitchen.
The man in the kitchen isn’t being overwhelmed by anything. Nothing is failing to fit. That’s the whole point — what he’s feeling is fit. Where awe is the shock of the vast, this is the settling of a kind of homelessness, and it needs no accommodation at all, because there’s nothing to accommodate.
I want to be stubborn about this, because these two get run together constantly and they really aren’t the same. Awe un-homes you. Belonging moves the other way.
I should admit the science here is thinner than the science of awe. There’s no agreed name for it. Researchers looking at self-transcendent states have found that such experiences come apart into two pieces — a dissolving one, where your ordinary sense of being a bounded self loosens its grip, and a relational one, a sense of connection with something beyond yourself. It’s the second that the kitchen is about, and it can show up with no dissolving whatsoever, and nothing vast anywhere in sight. Past that, the literature mostly folds it into awe, or into feeling close to nature, and moves along. That’s a real gap, and I’d rather point at it than pretend it isn’t there.
Here’s what I’d say about it. Being at home in the world isn’t the discovery that the world was built for you. It’s not a claim about the universe’s intentions at all — I don’t think I’m in a position to make one. It’s the experience of standing inside a relation that was already there. Of having been made out of the thing you’re standing in, rather than dropped into it from somewhere else. Whatever else may be true, that part isn’t an illusion. You really are continuous with what surrounds you, all the way down and all the way back. Feeling it isn’t a mistake.
And there’s something the two registers share, which is why they belong in one essay. Both are moments when the boundary between you and everything else turns out to be less solid, and less final, than you’d been treating it.
Why nobody was ever argued into this
Here’s something that’s baffled reformers for as long as there have been reformers.
You can give someone the argument. You can give it well, and watch them follow it, and watch them agree — and then watch absolutely nothing change about what they care about. Anyone who’s tried to move a room with a good case has felt this. The case lands. Nothing moves.
The traditions figured this out a very long time ago, and they built accordingly.
Look at what contemplative practice actually claims to do. Not one of the great traditions says that sitting still will make you better at figuring out how the world works. That’s not the offer. The offer is that it changes what shows up as mattering — what grabs you, what holds your attention, what you find yourself identified with. And the method is never argument. It’s repetition, posture, attention, fasting, silence, ritual, pilgrimage, and a great deal of time.
That’s not a primitive stand-in for reasoning. It’s the right tool for a different job.
Because there are two quite different pieces of machinery running in any agent. One is in the business of what works — how things go, what follows from what, what’ll happen if you do this instead of that. The other is in the business of what matters — what’s at stake, what would be a loss, what you wouldn’t do. They aren’t the same, and being good at the first doesn’t 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 just isn’t the same operation as its coming to matter.
Argument belongs to the first kind. It goes to work on the model of what works, where it’s very good indeed, and it has almost no grip 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 actually does, ended up on practice instead.
I take that as a real finding, not a curiosity. If you want to change what a person takes into account, you won’t do it by explaining. Stories do some of it. Shared work does more. Practice, kept up over years, does the most. The people who built the monasteries weren’t being unscientific. They were being empirical on a longer clock than we usually manage.
The part that must not be explained away
Now I have to go carefully, because this is where accounts like mine usually go wrong.
Ask people what happened to them in these experiences and they mostly don’t describe a feeling. They describe an encounter. Not “I felt deeply moved about the world” but “I met something.” And what they report carries a particular kind of weight — it feels less like an emotion and more like finding out. Philosophers call this the noetic quality. It’s the sense that the experience wasn’t about your inner life at all, but about what’s actually there.
This is the thing most often lost in translation, and losing it isn’t a small error. If you take an experience whose entire content is I encountered something real and re-describe it as you had a strong feeling, you haven’t given an account of it. You’ve contradicted the person and called it an explanation.
The move usually goes like this: you felt united with everything, but what was actually happening was reduced activity in a particular brain network. I want to be exact about why that fails, because the reason isn’t politeness.
It fails because it needs a vantage point nobody has.
To say what was actually happening is to claim a view from which the experience can be seen truly and the person’s own account of it seen falsely — a position outside all positions, where reality gets read off directly and everybody’s report is checked against it. That’s exactly the vantage this book says doesn’t exist. And the denial isn’t selective. It’s denied to the mystic, who has a finally of their own, and it’s denied, in the same breath and with the same force, to the neuroscientist.
So I’m not in a position to tell anyone what they met, or that it was less than they took it to be. I have no standpoint from which that could be said.
And I’d rather say the next part outright than leave it to be worked out. I’m not writing about this from outside it. I’ve had both of the experiences I opened with — the ridge and the kitchen, in my own versions, more than once — and I’ve never wanted either of them explained to me. They’re among the things I value most, and they’ve changed the direction of a life. Any account I give here has to leave them standing, or it isn’t an account I’d accept either.
What I can say is something about the word made — because people hear it as a demotion, and it isn’t one.
The boundary between you and the “Other” isn’t a fact you found lying around in the world. It’s drawn. It could have been drawn otherwise, and people in different times and conditions have in fact drawn it very differently. In that sense it’s made. But made isn’t the same as arbitrary, and it’s nothing like fictional. The world pushes back. Not every way of drawing that line survives contact with what’s really out there — most don’t — and the ones that last do so because they answer to something that isn’t up to us. Between a fact read off the universe from nowhere, and a story we tell that could just as easily have been any other story, there’s a third thing. It’s where nearly everything important actually lives.
Which means this. When someone tells me they met something that wasn’t themselves, and that it had a reality their own preferences got no vote on — I think they’re reporting accurately. Something did push back. That’s not the part I’d question.
The part I’d decline is only the last step. The one that says and therefore I have apprehended the ground of everything, from outside all vantages, finally.
It’s the same step the neuroscientist takes, pointed the other way. What you met was only ever neurons and what you met was the ground of everything are both claims made from outside every position — the place where the matter gets settled and everybody’s report is checked against it. Nobody stands there, whichever way you were pointed.
And I decline that one for everybody at the table, myself included.
A question you can ask from inside
If all that’s right, then there’s something practical to be had here, and I think it’s the most useful thing in this essay.
Traditions built around these experiences have produced, demonstrably, both of the outcomes I described. The same lineage that extended care to the stranger, the leper, the enemy, has also sealed itself against the heretic and burned the doubter. Both. Often in the same century.
Most accounts from outside handle this by grading the whole enterprise — religion is on balance good, or on balance bad, stack the wars against the hospitals and see what’s left. I’ve never found that exercise worth much. And it’s useless to anyone inside a tradition who wants to know how they’re doing.
Here’s a question that isn’t useless, and that needs no view from nowhere to ask:
Is this coherence bought by refusing to look at something that has already reached me?
That’s the whole test. Notice what it doesn’t ask. It doesn’t ask whether your circle is the right size, because I don’t think there is a right size and I wouldn’t know how to find out. It doesn’t ask you to measure your tradition against somebody else’s standard of enlightenment. It asks only about your own process — whether the thing holding your world together is being kept up by turning away from something that already arrived at your door.
Not looking because you haven’t encountered it isn’t a failure. Nobody encounters everything. Not looking because there’s only so much of you and the day is finite isn’t a failure either — that’s just being a creature. The failure is a specific one: something reached you, and taking it in would have cost you your settlement, so you arranged not to see it.
Anyone can run that test, from inside anything, without leaving. And there’s a second one that goes with it, because these experiences have a characteristic counterfeit.
The counterfeit is the feeling without the growing. An experience that hands you the sense of enormous opening and asks nothing, changes nothing, costs nothing — the reward pulled loose from the work. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s most of what’s currently sold under the name. And the test is embarrassingly simple. Afterward, is there anything you now take into account that you didn’t before? Did the circle move, or did you just have an experience of it moving?
I ask myself this one, and I don’t always like the answer.
Whether the road arrives
Now to the thing I’ve been walking toward. I want to handle it carefully, because it’s where I differ from a lot of people I deeply respect, and I’d rather be clear than comfortable.
A great many people doing the work of making things better hold, in one form or another, that history is going somewhere in particular — that there’s a convergence, a completion, a point where all this long labor arrives. The most beautiful modern version of it 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 that he didn’t treat as a distant abstraction at all, but as a person. Already there. Already pulling.
I’m not going to argue against that, and I want to say plainly why not — because “I decline to argue” can be its own kind of condescension, and I don’t mean it that way.
Whether there’s a personal reality at the end of things isn’t a question my framework has any equipment to settle. Nothing I’ve said implies there isn’t one. 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 back, applied here.
But there are three places where I do differ, and they’re real, and pretending otherwise would insult everybody.
The first is arrival. I don’t think perfection is what the process is heading toward, and my reason isn’t that it’s too far off. It’s that a completed perfection would be the end of the very thing being valued. If you arrive — really arrive, nothing further to take in, no more coherence to build — then growth is over. Adaptation is over. What you’ve got at that point isn’t fulfillment. It’s stasis. Everything this book calls moral is a motion, and a motion that’s reached its destination has stopped being one.
So refusing a final arrival isn’t, on my account, a subtraction from hope. It’s what keeps the thing you hoped for from being cancelled the moment it succeeds.
The second is guarantee. I can’t promise it comes right. The widening I’ve described is a direction agents can take, and often do. It isn’t a law the universe enforces, and I know of nothing that makes the long run bend the way we’d want. That’s a genuinely harder place to stand than the alternative, and I don’t offer it as an upgrade in comfort. It asks more of you, not less.
The third follows from the second, and it’s the one that actually changes what people do. If the arrival is assured, then present suffering is, in the final accounting, redeemed by what comes later. And an enormous amount of harm has been permitted, across a great many centuries, by people who believed exactly that and were therefore able to be patient with things that should never have been borne patiently.
I’m not the first to say this, and I’m not saying it from outside. The sharpest version I know was made by a Catholic philosopher against that same Jesuit — in his own church, in his own language. The charge was that if you make redemption an evolutionary inevitability, you’ve quietly erased the cross, the reality of evil, and the distance between the kingdom and the world as it actually is. Yes, he asked, but what Christ? That’s not a secular objection. It’s a family argument, and it’s been going on a long time.
Which brings me to the thing I most want to say here.
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 worked out that because what the soul reaches toward is infinite, the reaching can never be finished — and that this isn’t 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, about the vision that’s the whole point of the journey: this truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. Later scholars gave the idea a name, and later theologians have argued about whether that endless climbing keeps going past the end of the world or settles into a rest that’s somehow also motion. They’re arguing still.
The apophatic writers got to the same place by a different road: any positive description of the ultimate is already a falsification, so what the mind does isn’t arrive — it strips away, endlessly. A twentieth-century philosophical theology built an entire account in which the divine itself is unfinished, everlastingly enriched by what happens, never closed. A Sufi master in thirteenth-century Andalusia separated the journey to God, which ends, from the journey in God, which can’t, because the self-disclosures are infinite and never repeat. The Kabbalists set the reachable emanations against an infinite that isn’t reachable at all. And the great Vedanta schools split right here — one saying liberation is a sudden and total realization, the other that the soul keeps its distinction precisely so it can go on in endless devotion.
I’m not claiming any of these people as allies. Several would have found my position appalling and would have been within their rights. I’m pointing out that the question is old, and it’s internal — and that anyone who’s been told the choice is between a religion that promises arrival and a secularism that promises nothing has been handed a false description of the field.
What we can actually do together
So here’s where I think we stand, those of us trying to make things better who don’t agree about the shape of the end.
We differ about whether the road arrives. That difference is real, I haven’t dissolved it, and I’ve named the one place where it changes what people do. I’d rather have it in the open than smoothed over, and I don’t expect it to be settled — certainly not by me, and probably not in our lifetimes.
And here’s what I notice, which strikes me as 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 it, and to keep going at the point where stopping would be easier. Some of you understand that work as taking part in something that’s drawing you forward. I understand it as a direction agents can take, with nothing underneath it guaranteeing anything. We are describing the same road and doing the same work on it.
That isn’t a compromise, and it isn’t politeness. It’s the actual shape of the situation. Agreeing about what the world is made of has never been the requirement for building something together. It’s never once been available, and everything humans have ever built in common got built without it. What’s required is a shared direction and honest dealing about where we differ — a much lower bar than agreeing on metaphysics, and a much higher one than tolerance.
I’d go further. Your difference from me may be holding something up. If the people who hold an assured convergence can be tempted into patience with what shouldn’t be borne, then the people who hold no guarantee can be tempted into despair, and into the particular exhaustion of believing it all rests on them. Those two failure modes correct each other. A group with both in it is steadier than a group with either.
What it asks
Let me end where the ridge began.
The woman on that ridge was asked something that night, and she knows it, even though she’s never had the words for it. The vastness didn’t tell her anything. It delivered no message and settled no question. It made what she had to hold bigger, and then it left her with the holding.
That’s what these experiences ask, every time. Not belief. Not agreement. They ask whether you’ll let what you met change the shape of what you take into account — knowing the other door is right there, and easier, and that going through it will feel like loyalty.
And the answer isn’t given once. It’s given at every scale you happen to occupy, which is the last thing I want to say.
You’re asked it as a person, about the people right around you, in the ordinary daily way, mostly in small increments, mostly with nobody watching. You’re asked it as a member of every we you belong to — your family, your work, your congregation, your town — each of which has boundaries somebody is maintaining, and each of which can buy its coherence honestly, by widening, or cheaply, by narrowing. You’re 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 go with them. We managed the wiring. The wiring was never the achievement. Being connected to everyone isn’t 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’re asked it now about minds we’re in the middle of making, which will inherit whatever width of care we manage to build into them, and whatever narrowness we fail to notice.
None of this arrives anywhere. That’s the part I’d ask you to consider rather than mourn. There’s no final version of us, no completed circle, no last enlargement after which the work is done — 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 the road, and the next thing that has already reached you and is waiting to see whether you’ll look.
Look.
Sources & further reading
This essay works with 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-part account, perceived vastness and a need for accommodation, that this essay’s opening rests on. 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), pick out the threat-based variant. One caution worth passing along: the much-repeated link between awe and generosity is shakier 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 finding that such experiences come apart 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 points at the gap instead of 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 climb 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 you’ve addressed classical theism; Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (2000), for the difference 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 agreeing to a list of propositions.
Within the framework: Foundations (perspectival realism — why there’s no view from nowhere, for anyone); Standing, and the Widening Circle (standing as something 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).