Awe

An essay adapted from a talk by Carol Russell, given at Prescott Insight Meditation,
August 25, 2026


I recently read a book called Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner. Keltner is a professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley and considered an expert in human emotion.

What is awe? I imagine we all have a feeling for what it is. We know the experience of it. Here is Dacher Keltner’s definition: 

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.

How do we know we are in the presence of something that transcends our current take on the world? Awe expresses itself in the physical body with three signs: tears, goose bumps, and that sensation of a chill going up your spine. 

Awe holds a unique place within the world of emotions.  While other emotions can be seen as individualistic, and usually based on self-preservation, awe opens us up to what is outside our individual selves. Awe is often connected with feelings of love, beauty, reverence, gratitude, and respect. Even humility, as we may at times feel ourselves diminutive in the vastness of the universe.

Awe is available to us every day. The experience of awe can be fostered in our lives.

While in the Middle of Many Errands
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

At the edge of the Big Five parking lot,
in a tree still fully leafed out in November,
there must have been hundreds of invisible birds
all singing as if singing is what a day is for,
and the riotous song traveled
over the vast black asphalt sea
crossing all the organizing straight white lines--
so much song for such a small tree--
and stunned, my daughter and I stood and listened,
our rush stopped by the glorious commotion,
as if awe is what a day is for,
as if we exist to be stretched ever wider by disbelief,
as if we are here to know ourselves
as part of something greater,
the world calling us again and again
deeper into the mystery.

Do you hear that expansive aspect of awe expressed in the poem?  stretched ever wider by disbelief…as if we are here to know ourselves as part of something greater…

This is what is unique about awe among all the emotions, this stretching our understanding of the world, opening to mystery, to vastness. What slips into the background is the individual self, the self that, in our practice, we come to question. This is one of the insights that we explore in our practice, anattā, not-self. As Guy Armstrong writes: ‘This sense of self, or ‘I,’ seems unmistakably real, yet when we look for it directly, it is elusive…The self is not real in the ways we take it to be.’ 

So, this experience of awe is like a window into something greater than self, even connected to that which is outside of our sense of self. Can we see it that way?

Herman Hesse said it this way:

…wonderment …makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.

The other day a friend was telling me how he sometimes tunes into the Sunday morning services of the church he attended when he was a child. He likes to sing along with the hymns he remembers from his childhood. I was so touched by this that my eyes teared up. Awe.

Recently I was listening to the Bruch Violin Concerto #1. The third movement is energetic and soaring, with the full force of the orchestra dancing with the violin solo. I felt chills move up my spine. Awe.

When I was on retreat in New Mexico in July, the retreat land was so utterly gorgeous that I had moments of sensing myself part of a great goodness and beauty, part of an inter-dependent, collaborative, and on-going wondrous world. Awe.

If you’ve been studying the Dhamma for a while, perhaps you have had an experience of awe around the teachings. Guy Armstrong writes about how there are three approaches to the Dhamma. The first is understanding that comes from hearing or reading about the Dhamma. This gives us a kind of conceptual knowledge. The second is understanding that comes from reflection. We take the ideas we’ve heard about and deliberately think about how they might apply to our life and experience. We’re still in the rational realm, but we’re thinking on our own ‘in a way that feels new and direct.’ 

The third category is understanding that comes from meditative insight. This level is non-conceptual and can arise in a flash of understanding, that later we may form into words. Even when it is subtle, this level has the power to transform our lives. This is why this path is called Insight Meditation, or vipassana, a style of meditation that emphasizes this third kind of understanding. Insight can’t be forced or demanded; it simply arises when the conditions are suitable. An aspect of the conditions that insight is dependent on is meditation, as well as the first two approaches to understanding, study and refection. This prepares the ground for insight to arise.

Have you ever had an experience of insight that left you with a feeling of awe? For me, it can be like a piece of the puzzle just fell into place, an ah-ha flash that leaves me with a impression of connecting with something greater than myself. This can be especially impactful when I am meditating because I am still and present, and very open to fresh understandings. 

In my experience, awe can arise from a close brush with disaster. Driving through the reservation up north on the way home from New Mexico, I pulled off the two-lane road to stretch and as I was pulling back on the road, an approaching car was just then pulling into my lane to pass a car, right where I was. I was able to stop just in time. A second earlier and I believe we could have had a head-on collision. In that moment, I was filled with breathtaking aliveness and awe and an indescribable sense of my inexplicable good fortune. I’m here.

Later, I thought of that poem that Brian Lesage used in the dhamma talk that Mark played in June. The poem is called Could Have by Wislawa Szymborska. Here are a few lines:

…within an inch, a hairsbreadth from
an unfortunate coincidence.

So you’re here? Still dizzy from another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn’t be more shocked or speechless.

Isn’t it true that countless things have had to line up for us to be here? Yet, here we are.
Like our ancestors. You wouldn’t be here if not for your parents, and their parents, and so on, as delightfully described in this piece, Ancestral Mathematics:

In order to be born, you needed:

2 parents
4 grandparents
8 great-grandparents
16 second great-grandparents
32 third great-grandparents
64 fourth great-grandparents
128 fifth great-grandparents
256 sixth great-grandparents
512 seventh great-grandparents
1,024 eighth great-grandparents
2,048 ninth great-grandparents
For you to be born today from 12 previous generations, you needed a total sum of 4,094 ancestors over the last 400 years.

Think for a moment – How many struggles? How many battles? How many difficulties? How much sadness? How much happiness? How many love stories? How many expressions of hope for the future? – did your ancestors have to undergo for you to exist in this present moment…
[from Lyrical Zen]

When I reflect on that, the fact that if any one of those 4000 ancestors didn’t have the next child in my lineage I wouldn’t be here, I get a feeling of vast mystery; and as in all of the experiences of awe that I have shared, I am shifted out of my ordinary ways of perceiving my life and the world.

Can you see how awe might be an experience worth paying attention to, even cultivating?


Dr. Keltner did a study of 26 cultures around the world and mapped out eight encounters – he calls them the Eight Wonders of Life - that people report most commonly bring on the feeling of awe. It is inspiring to me that these experiences are so human, that they often transcend culture.

What would you guess would be the most common trigger for awe? 

Here are the Eight Wonders:

1. Moral beauty – other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming difficulties. Exceptional virtue, character, and ability, a kind of purity of intention and action.
   
2. Collective effervescence – the experience of merging into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic ‘we.’ Like at a sports event, wedding, political rally.
3. Nature –A beautiful sunset, seeing the Grand Canyon.
4. Music – Like my experience of listening to the Bruch violin concerto. It could be the Rolling Stones, any music that moves you.
5. Visual design – Beautiful art, patterns, sacred geometry.
6. Spiritual awe – Mystical awe – maybe you’ve felt this walking into a cathedral or – I remember the first time I saw a photo of the Hubble Deep Field – I had to close the book for a moment and just breathe it in.
7. Life and death – Holding a newborn child, or being present for the death of a loved one.
8. Epiphany (insight) – The experience of a flash of insight and understanding.

In all the stories of awe collected from around the world, nothing materialistic was ever mentioned as a source of awe. Not money, not our digital gadgets, not expensive consumer purchases. Awe is an experience apart from the material, often connected to the heart, to relationships, to mystery, to beauty, to the sacred.


I listened to a Podcast the other day about goose bumps, or what some people call ‘aesthetic chill’– that physical experience of what we are calling awe: like being at a sporting event and your team makes an impossible comeback, or profound religious revelations, or witnessing an unexpected act of heroism, or getting into a deep conversation on meaningful topics with people you care about, or experiences of art, poetry, or science. 

In the podcast there are two scientists who have been researching this subject. They observed that the experience of ‘the chills’ often came on when a person reached the ‘limits of cognition’ – something no longer computes. The key is what is being challenged is a deeply held (probably unconscious) belief, one of those assumptions we walk around with about how the world is, who we are, who others are, how things go. 

An example might be a deeply-held belief that people are basically self-centered and out for themselves. Then you witness an unprecedented act of kindness and that belief comes into question in a momentary but profound way. When one of our beliefs gets challenged, we can get the chills. It’s like a software update on our own ‘meaning-making process.’

Interestingly, the researchers discovered the ‘chills’ comes first, and then the re-thinking happens. It’s like the body knows; it’s the body’s way of saying, ’pay attention; there’s something here.’ Awe opens our perception. 

Remember the definition of awe that Dacher Keltner offers in his book:
Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.
Awe is the sign that we are standing at the edge of our knowledge and perception of the world, and that there is more than we knew, and this experience asks us to reset our understanding.
As if we exist to be stretched ever wider by disbelief, the poet said. Stretched.


How might awe fit into our practice? On the most basic level, awe is the same as any experience we have, something to be mindfully known when it arises within, just as we might note embarrassment or peace arising. But might it also be that here is another way to cultivate what is positive and pleasant in our experiences, to savor. Not as a way of denying the more difficult parts of life, but as a skillful way of building our capacity to be with whatever arises; by anchoring ourselves in the pleasurable aspects of being alive we are more open to all of it, more open to the Dhamma. Remember Brenda talking about her teacher’s question after her month-long retreat: Did you have fun? The Dhamma is as much about joy as it is about dukkha. There are awe-inspiring things happening within and all around us.

For me, I find the experience of awe is an experience of aliveness, of coming into contact with deeper, richer parts of life. Awe is an experience of expanding beyond my ‘self,’ beyond the mundane, like a falling into receptivity to what is mysterious and vast and astounding and humbling. It’s a momentary stepping out of the automaticity of habitual mind states.


Perhaps we can feel the heartfelt pull toward the wondrous, as Rilke so beautifully expresses in this poem:

Oh, not to be separated,
shut off from the starry dimensions
by so thin a wall.

What is within us
if not intensified sky
traversed with birds

and deep
with winds of homecoming?


Homecoming. That word fits, too, because of the feeling of opening to the interrelationship that underlies the world around me. Awe can do that.

Awe is an experience we can cultivate. I believe it is good for me, for my well-being, to be open to a daily dose of awe. We can train ourselves to recognize it – ah, this is awe – this sweet chill going up my spine, these goose bumps rising on my arms, these tears appearing in my eyes - and we can take a moment to linger there. Let it arise, let it pass. For me, these can be very small moments, ones that might pass me by before I began to slow down with them, allowing myself to be AWESTRUCK.