A Little Awe Goes A Long Way

Issue Five: The Understory

I recall what seemed like an endless meadow of wildflowers. Uninterrupted fields leading to the base of jagged San Juan mountain peaks flecked by snow. At over 10,000 feet, I was well above the treeline. It felt like there was nothing between me and the sun. The sky shone a brighter blue than I had ever seen.

Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, this southwestern Colorado landscape had been entirely unimaginable. A place where there was no sign of human manipulation of the environment. Landscapes that existed for their own sake. It was through that experience in the summer of 1991 with Deer Hill Expeditions that I realized a vastness to our world and how little I knew of it. I had fallen in love with nature.

This nearly thirty-year-old memory was stored in the recesses of my body, nearly entirely forgotten until excavated. And yet this journey in the wilderness was one of the most formative experiences in my life.

• How is it that we can so easily forget those experiences of deepest meaning and personal transformation?

• How does the transformative effect of those experiences endure in our conviction, values, and actions?

• We would never forget our first love, so how could we forget the first time we truly fell in love with nature? 

For the past three months I have been taking a course with nineteen others from around the world on how to expand my executive coaching practice to include deepening our connections with the living planet. I’ve come to realize the important linkage between our emotions about the natural world and our feelings of (dis)connection to it. Anger, grief, overwhelm, denial, apathy, scarcity, and fear are some of the myriad emotions that nuance our relationship with nature. Without help and introspection it can be difficult to realize that we have these emotions, let alone unpack their complex effects on our (in)actions. I have one of my co-coaches, Gosia, to thank for helping me connect with my feelings of environmental grief and surfacing the Colorado memory. Our coaching session reminded me how influential the preservation of wild places for their own sake is to my values.

The Current Flowing Through Our Lives

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.” — Immanuel Kant

My Colorado wilderness experience was a stream whose current has been flowing underneath the surface of my life ever since I was fifteen. The current moved me to the front lines of environmental justice protests in Memphis. It gave me the conviction to lead the environmental organization at Colorado College, and then again with Net Impact during my MBA at The University of Texas. The current takes me back to the wilderness with my family. It even compels me to write The Understory each week. 

In Climate: A New Story, Charles Eisenstein searches for answers to why the natural world is (dis)integrated from our lives. Much like George Marshall’s realization that we need to look inward to the stories we tell ourselves rather than outwards towards an external enemy (see Issue Four), Eisenstein thinks there is immense power in changing our internal narrative about the planet and our relationship to it. He assesses that “we live in a system, an ideology, and probably a wounded psychology that allow full feeling only sporadically. The system numbs us; it also depends on our numbness.” 

Eisenstein illustrates this numbness in recounting a conversation with a farmer in North Carolina, Mike, whose bitterness was acute when describing current affairs. “Mike wasn’t understanding me. He is an intelligent man, but it was as if something had possessed him; no matter what I said, he would pick up on one or two cue words to pour forth more bitterness.” In grappling with the challenge of connecting with Mike at a human level, Eisenstein changed the conversational course. He posed a deceptively simple question to Mike, “what made you into an environmentalist?” 

The conversational tenor immediately changed and Mike’s numbness faded. Anger and bitterness gave way to grief. Grief about how development had destroyed the ponds, streams, and lands where Mike had hunted, fished, and roamed as a child. Those spaces had been paved over, cordoned off, filled in, and cut down. Mike was left suspended in his grief of what had been lost, unable to translate the love he had for the natural world to the conviction to help protect every being on earth. Mike had become disconnected from his own current, and the effects were an outward projection of anger rather than grief over loss and sacredness.

The Significance of Awe

My “initiatory experience” into environmentalism was not one of cumulative moments like Mike, but rather a singular moment that was so profound it created awe for the natural world. And it turns out that distinctions between beauty and awe are significant in their enduring effects on our conscience. In their 2003 paper, Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual and aesthetic emotion, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt sought out to define the emotional research of awe through a literature review across the fields of religion, sociology, philosophy, and psychology. The researchers found that awe had been largely neglected by emotional theorists despite its transformative effect on reorienting peoples’ lives, goals, and values. Their research led them to identify two themes that must be present in order for an awe-inducing experience—vastness and accommodation.

Vastness is anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self and one’s ordinary frame of reference. My Colorado experience shattered my frame of reference for the wilderness. Edmund Burke (1757) called this obscurity when the mind has difficulty grasping the origin, form, and design of what we experience. Burke examined how art could induce feelings of obscurity. He observed that obscure images in paintings were more likely to render sublime (awe) feelings than clearly rendered images. The reason being that the obscure suggests power to us—a necessity for an awe experience—through the unknown “such as vastness, magnificence, succession, infinity, and certain properties of light, colour, and sound.” 

The Monk by the Sea (1808-10), Caspar David Friedrich

Keltner and Haidt tell us that vastness alone cannot induce awe, but must be in combination with accommodation. In other words, the experience must destabilize our mental structures enough so that we must resolve what we are experiencing with what came before it. For me, I had to reconcile the vastness of the landscape I was experiencing with an unknown, much broader world. It is this very process of assimilation that leads to the enduring qualities of an awe experience. Without accommodation, the experience is a bit like an untied full balloon—filled with potential only to be expended in a flurry to end up lying limp on the floor.

Abraham Maslow was also intrigued by awe and wrote extensively on the transformative potential of “peak experiences” for creating an altered state of consciousness. Peak experiences were part of reaching Maslow’s aspirational state of self-actualization.  According to Kelter and Haidt:

“Based on his interviews with hundreds of people, Maslow (1964) listed 25 features of peak experiences. These include: disorientation in space and time, ego transcendence and self-forgetfulness; a perception that the world is good, beautiful, and desirable; feeling passive, receptive, and humble; a sense that polarities and dichotomies have been transcended or resolved; and feelings of being lucky, fortunate, or graced.”

Maslow’s qualities of peak experiences combine those of vastness and of accommodation. Across disciplines Kelter and Haidt found a general agreement between theorists that awe involves an experience with something powerful accompanied by a feeling of submission to it. Just as there is no awe in vastness without accommodation, neither is there in submission without a powerful other such as nature, God, or a leader.

Transcending Ego with Awe

You might be thinking that awe experiences sound great and all (and glad you had one, Adam), but how does this connect to climate change and the protection of our living planet? In his essay “A Native Hill” within The Art of the Commonplace, Wendell Berry challenges the contemporary operating assumption that what is good for us is good for the planet:

“We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”

Berry asks us to start with the health of the planet in determining the paths of our lives rather than putting ourselves first and hoping the planet will be okay. Berry recognizes that our ability to stand in awe of the world around us will renew our convictions to protect it. But we must put our own egos aside, which we all know is no simple feat, but one that the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1887) thought possible:

“A man who experiences such sentiments feels that he is dominated by forces which he does not recognize as his own, and which he is not the master of, but is led by...Following the collectivity, the individual forgets himself for the common end and his conduct is directed by reference to a standard outside himself.”

Durkheim realized that emotions had the power to bind not only one individual to another but also an individual to collective interests and social institutions. Emotions can be so powerful that they enable us to focus on a standard outside ourselves. A healthy, living planet is one of those standards that at times feels impossible, but that I think we can inch closer to with more awe in our lives.

In Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior (2015), Piff, Dietze, Feinberg, Stancato, and Keltner led five studies to test the hypothesis of whether “awe can result in a diminishment of the individual self and its concerns, and increase prosocial behavior.” While the studies are too detailed to cover here, they reviewed that awe experiences predicted greater generosity (Studies 1 & 3), increased ethical decision-making (Study 2), induced prosocial values such as sharing & caring (Study 4), and enhanced helping behaviour and decreased entitlement (Study 5). In other words, awe can have massive downstream effects on our abilities to remain conscious of something greater than ourselves and motivate acts of goodness for others. Awe experiences make us less likely to define ourselves using individuated terms and feel connected to something larger than ourselves such as a community, culture, the human species, or nature. A smaller self means more attention and action for the collective. Climate change is one the most vexing collective action problems of our time. We can look to awe experiences as one way of helping individuals transcend the distance, uncertainty, villainizing, and incomprehensibility that leaves us paralyzed and separated from our present actions and values (Issue Four). 

So if awe experiences can help unlock such a wellspring of goodness in us, you are probably wondering how might we create more of them? It turns out that natural settings are fruitful terrain for awe, as is religion, art, literature, and spirituality. In Study 5, the researchers were able to trigger awe effects after just one minute looking up at tall trees, showing that even fleeting experiences of awe might have a meaningful impact.

Conclusion

Awe experiences can help to overcome our egos and bind us to collective interests such as climate change. Keltner and Haidt suggest that awe experiences should share five elements: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, and the supernatural. Their research tells us that we cannot have awe without both vastness and accommodation, recognizing the transformative effects of these experiences on our own mental picture of the world. While we might have grand awe experiences that reorient our lives, goals, and values, we can also have more minor experiences of awe that tap into the current running through our lives. Rather than turning all our environmental attention outward to actors such as corporations and policymakers, we should instead also turn inward to our own stories. As Eisenstein, Kant, Berry and Durkheim tell us, it is through internal connectedness that we can find the conviction to protect the external of our living planet.

I’d like to ask you to consider and share—what made you into an environmentalist?

Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead (with a dash of awe, too).

Adam

---

Photo credit: John Fowler “Wildflowers” & “Go with the Flow” shared by CC BY 2.0