The Cultivation of Awe (Pt. 1)

I’ve gotten to thinking about the experience of awe, especially in how it figures into the project of dismantling depression and anxiety. So the question for this essay boils down to: how does awe affect mood?
Ok. If we start with a brief definition from Websters, we get:

“Awe: an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime.”

I like this definition because it’s pithy, as well as expressive of the “layers” of awe that make up this complex emotion.

Three layers of Awe

Dread: this is where the individual ego perceives its smallness in the face of both what is vast, as well as what is impersonal. The small, personal self looks at that which transcends and includes it with dread. It fears its own destruction by mistaking its larger self–that which is sacred or sublime–as something foreign. Imagine your liver chugging along, doing its liver thing, and then suddenly it becomes aware not just of the other organs around it, but of how they connect to it, and how it connects to them. “I’m not just me! When did I get plugged into all this?!” That is, dread.

But then there is the experience of veneration (and perhaps the definition above can be seen as laying out both layers and stages of response to the sacred). The vastness is felt as still separate, but as something that one can have a relationship with (that doesn’t lead to one’s destruction). Your connection is one of association; you participate in the vastness by bowing down.

Then there is wonder. Wonder does not have the element of fear that is in dread, and often woven into veneration. Here is amazement, and in this expression of awe, there is a forgetting of the small ego self. The participation is one of affinity; you see that you are like the vastness. The experience is openness without fear.

Awe and Mood

What, then, does awe have to offer people suffering anxiety and depression? In terms of just the management of these conditions, awe is not actually that important. But in my experience, to fundamentally transform anxiety and depression, awe is actually essential. Why?

If depression boils down to alienation–at the mental, emotional, physical, and neurological levels–then awe is its antithesis. Awe is the experience that depends on a recognition of something larger than oneself (re-cognition, a thought about); an emotional openness or resonance that has the three flavors (dread, veneration, wonder); a physical resonance with the vastness, whether echoing fear or joy; and the neurological resonance that actually allows the thoughts, emotions, and sensations to be felt.

It might be too much to say that depression and awe cannot go together; it seems more of a spectrum, where depression increases as awe decreases. I.e., depression holds more dread than wonder, as it is more intense, and awe holds more wonder as it is more intense.

So if there was a way to consciously cultivate awe, it would mean, in effect, consciously cultivating un-depression and un-anxiety. The more of the one, the less of the other. Try having the same door open and closed at the same time. It can’t be done. And if it’s more open, then it’s less closed.