Awe

Awe empowers sacrifice, and inspires us to give that most precious of resources, time. Memphis University professor Jia Wei Zhang and I brought people to a lab where they were surrounded by either awe-inspiring plants or less-inspiring ones. As participants were leaving the lab, we asked if they would fold origami cranes to be sent to victims of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Being surrounded with awe-inspiring plants led people to volunteer more time. The last pillar of the default self—striving for competitive advantage, registered in a stinginess toward giving away possessions and time—crumbles during awe.

Awe awakens the better angels of our nature.

The Sequel

Perhaps there will be a sequel to Inside Out. And who knows, perhaps Awe will be a character in Riley’s mind, transforming her sense of self, opening her to wonder, and inclining her to saintly tendencies after encounters with the wonders of life. In the sequel, Riley could be older, perhaps a college student, and moved by Awe to youthful encounters with moral beauty, dancing at parties, outdoor concerts, and late-night conversations about the meaning of life, all so very fitting for a young adult.

And if I had my druthers, in this sequel Riley would be a budding neuroscientist. If so, there could be a scene in which she presents to her lab a video called “Waterfall Display,” which is narrated by her hero, Jane Goodall. In the video, a solitary chimpanzee approaches a roaring waterfall. He piloerects (fluffs up his fur). He moves in swaying, rhythmic motions, swinging from one branch to another near the rushing river. He pushes large rocks into the river. At the end of this “dance” he sits quietly, absorbed in the flow of water. Jane Goodall observes that chimpanzees do the waterfall dance near waterfalls and roaring rivers, as well as during heavy rainstorms and sudden winds. She then speculates:

I can’t help feeling that this waterfall display, or dance, is perhaps triggered by feelings of awe, wonder, that we feel. . . . So why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside yourself?

At the short video’s conclusion, Riley would pose questions to her lab. Is the chimpanzee’s piloerection the same as our chills? What do those chills mean, anyway? Do chimpanzees have spiritual feelings? Why do we feel awe?

THREE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL What Our Tears, Chills, and Whoas Tell Us about the Why of Awe

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

• WALT WHITMAN

I only “cried” with the furrowed brow, closed mouth, and wince a few times while watching Rolf die and in the grief that followed. But I teared up all the time, when reminded of what brought us together in what was primary and good in our brotherhood.

In hearing music—the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours—that moved our young bodies during our formative family years, and songs—from Radiohead and Talking Heads—we sang driving up into the mountains. In seeing tennis and basketball courts and baseball diamonds in parks, fields of play during warm afternoons and dusks of our youth, and grassy golden-reddish California hills, the form and color of those dusks.

The summer after Rolf passed away, I drove into the eastern Sierras near Mammoth Lakes, California, to hike to Duck Lake, a thirteen-mile loop we had done the July before his colon cancer took hold of our lives. As I returned to that familiar place, the silhouetting line of mountain ridges surrounded me, backlit in the oranges, blues, fuchsias, and purples of sunset. Tears rose in my eyes, in thinking of the trails that held us as we wandered toward high granite passes. Chills rushed up my neck, in sensing him next to me in the car, as if we were leaning in together again, wondering about the mysteries of the Sierras. I heard the sound whoa. I felt overcome, and awestruck, by what was vanishing.

Why is awe accompanied by this constellation of tears, chills, and whoas?

To answer this question, we will tour the new science of the emotional body. Our guides will be Charles Darwin and William James, two angst-ridden Victorians who treated the emotional body like the corpse in a murder mystery: a vessel of clues that reveal the origins of our body’s present state. Both men grappled with the question of why we experience awe and related states, so close in meaning to our sense of a soul, that which is primary, good, and life-giving in human nature. And both would find answers in our bodies.