Awe

Awe is not a fleeting reaction to beauty or grandeur—it is an evolutionary force that changes how you see yourself, others, and the world. In his work on awe, Dacher Keltner defines the emotion as the feeling that arises when you encounter something vast that transcends your understanding and forces you to expand your mental models. This definition, co-developed with Jonathan Haidt, forms the scaffold for the entire journey of this book. It explains why you can feel awe before a towering tree, a heroic act, a piece of music, or an insight that rearranges your worldview. Each experience combines vastness and accommodation: the world feels larger, and you stretch to fit inside it.

The Eight Wonders of Life: Everyday Portals to Awe

From a dataset of 2,600 awe narratives across 26 countries, Keltner and collaborators distilled awe into eight major sources. These are: moral beauty (acts of courage and compassion), collective effervescence (shared rhythmic movement), nature, music, visual design, spirituality, life and death, and epiphany (insightful realization). Roughly five percent of awe experiences fall outside these domains, but the eight account for most of human encounters with wonder.

These domains are practical tools: they show how awe appears not just in the extraordinary but in the everyday. Diaries and lab experiments reveal that people experience awe two to three times a week—in sunsets, moral acts, or shared rituals. You do not need a pilgrimage or mountaintop; you only need mindful attention to what moves you.

Awe and the Wider Emotional Map

Keltner’s lab studies using emotional mappings of GIFs show awe’s position near admiration and beauty, not fear or horror. It often coexists with sadness yet feels expansive rather than threatening. The signature bodily pattern—eyes widened, breath slowed, the involuntary “whoa”—marks the start of an open, integrative mind state. Physiologically, awe directs your attention away from threat and toward connection.

Why Awe Matters

The book argues that awe is the emotion most responsible for moral elevation, scientific curiosity, and social cooperation. Its evolution likely supported survival: early humans who bonded through shared wonder at storms, animals, and rituals became more cohesive groups. Modern evidence shows awe enhances generosity, patience, and intellectual humility—traits societies urgently need. (William James, Charles Darwin, and Émile Durkheim all viewed awe as both spiritual and social glue.)

In this synthesis, you’ll see awe through every lens: its body language, neurological circuits, moral triggers, artistic and musical expressions, spiritual growth, and ecological healing. Each chapter reveals how awe shrinks the ego, builds community, repairs moral fabric, and unlocks systems thinking. Whether you approach through nature walks, music, or art, awe offers a reliable, evidence-based doorway to connection and meaning.

Core principle

Awe = encounter with vastness + accommodation. But, more deeply, awe = pathway to connection and transformation. Study it, invite it, embody it—and you expand the boundaries of who you think you are.

As you progress through these ideas, you’ll discover awe’s role in dissolving the self, healing through nature, transforming morality, synchronizing communities, animating music and art, deepening spiritual life, and teaching systems understanding. Each is a chapter in awe’s wider story—the emotion that makes humanity possible.

Awe’s first radical effect is psychological: it quiets what Keltner calls the default self—the mental voice obsessed with achievement, self-image, and worry. When awe strikes, that voice softens, and what emerges is a 'small self': humble, curious, and connected. Experiments confirm this shift. Yang Bai, for instance, had tourists at Yosemite draw themselves; those surrounded by natural vastness drew tiny figures, while those at Fisherman’s Wharf drew larger selves. Michelle Shiota’s T. rex study found that people awed by a skeleton wrote collective identities like “I am human” rather than personal traits.

Neural and Emotional Mechanisms

Neuroscience maps this transformation to decreased activity in the brain's default mode network (DMN), which governs self-referential thinking. Awe links the DMN to reward pathways instead of fear circuits, calming ego-based rumination. Once ego boundaries loosen, your perception widens, fostering curiosity and compassion rather than defense and judgment. That change shows up behaviorally: people exposed to awe give more money, volunteer longer, and judge arguments more carefully.

Saintly Tendencies and Collective Good

Keltner’s collaborations with Paul Piff and Jia Wei Zhang reveal a consistent pattern: awe promotes prosociality. After watching awe-inducing nature footage or standing under massive trees, participants share resources and act helpfully. Awe widens circles of concern—the emotion makes you care beyond kin or tribe. Even small interventions, such as 'awe walks' or viewing moral beauty, reduce selfish tendencies and amplify empathy.

Practical Application

To cultivate this in daily life, pause often for wonder. Listen to stirring music, notice courage, or walk under trees. When older adults practiced weekly awe walks, selfies shifted from self-centered to environment-centered—visual evidence of ego quieting. Awe helps you step out of small worries and join the larger human story unfolding around you.

Practical takeaway

Every time you cultivate awe, your self shrinks just enough for empathy to enter. That shift underlies moral progress and cooperative societies.

The quieting of the self is awe’s gateway effect—through it, we become capable of system-level understanding and moral expansion.

Awe doesn’t happen only in your head; it pulses through tears, chills, and spontaneous vocalizations. These reactions trace to our mammalian past and reveal how awe evolved as a social bond. Emotional tears, piloerection, and the universal “whoa” act as social signals that announce: something vast is here—pay attention, gather closer.

Tears and Connection

Alan Fiske’s idea of 'communal sharing' explains why you cry not just from sadness but when witnessing courage or kindness. Tears activate the vagus nerve and broadcast vulnerability—a cue for empathy. Keltner illustrates this in hospice scenes where caregivers and families cry together, forming strong social glue. These are not private breakdowns; they’re embodied affirmations of shared humanity.

Goose Bumps and Collective Safety

Goose bumps—technically piloerection—signal awe’s merging response. When mammals huddle for warmth or protection, that same physiology releases oxytocin and calm. Humans inherit this mechanism: the chills during a choir’s crescendo or a crowd’s cheer invite belonging. Awe leverages these physical systems to build groups ready to face vastness together.

The Universal “Whoa”

Across cultures—from California to Bhutan—people use the same brief vocal bursts (“whoa,” “aah”) when struck by wonder. These prelinguistic calls coordinate group attention. Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees at waterfalls display similar behaviors—piloerection and rhythmic movement—suggesting continuity across species.

Evolutionary logic

Tears, chills, and whoas helped early humans change fear into social curiosity. They amplified survival through connection rather than retreat.

Next time you feel tears or chills, notice their message: awe is reminding your body that you are not alone—that the best response to mystery is togetherness.

The most frequent global trigger of awe is moral beauty: moments of courage, compassion, or sacrifice that defy self-interest. They leave you tearful, inspired, and reoriented toward goodness. Keltner’s studies show that moral awe is more common than aesthetic or scientific awe—it arises from ordinary goodness rather than grand spectacle.

Everyday Moral Miracles

Across cultures, participants describe awe at mothers surviving stillbirths, strangers rescuing victims, or teachers dedicating their lives to students. In San Quentin Prison, restorative justice circles became laboratories for awe: men serving long sentences experienced transformation through public contrition and forgiveness—Louis Scott’s rehabilitation and Chris’s renunciation of racism elicited collective tears and reverence.

Repair Through Reverence

Moral beauty produces reverence—bowing, tears, touch—and physiological calm through oxytocin release and vagal tone. Awe at goodness doesn’t idolize; it invites imitation. Experiments show that witnessing altruistic acts increases volunteering and reduces prejudice, even in those predisposed to dominance. Within institutions like libraries or RJ programs, moral awe acts as social compost—turning pain into growth.

Why moral awe matters

Awe at goodness repairs social fabric—inviting compassion, humility, and shared responsibility. These experiences democratize virtue: heroism becomes communal rather than individual.

If you want awe that moves you to act, look around for moral beauty—it is everywhere, quietly sculpting humanity’s better future.

Wild awe—the vastness of nature—heals both body and spirit. It reminds you that your life fits within ecosystems rather than standing apart. Keltner’s research reveals quantifiable benefits: lower inflammation, calmer nervous systems, and psychological repair for trauma victims and veterans.

Biological Benefits

Daily awe correlates with reduced levels of Interleukin-6, an inflammatory marker, independent of other positive emotions. The likely mechanism is vagal activation—the same parasympathetic calm that follows tears or compassion. Wild awe integrates physiology and perspective, replacing loneliness or shame with belonging to a vast natural order.

Field Studies and Healing

Stacy Bare’s story illustrates nature’s redemptive power. As a traumatized veteran, he found new meaning in deserts and rivers, later guiding other veterans on wilderness trips. Keltner’s lab replicated these effects: rafting veterans and teens down the American River produced synchronized cortisol patterns and dramatic drops in depression and PTSD. Awe was the statistical predictor of improvement.

Small Practices, Large Outcomes

You can build similar benefits without wilderness travel. Awe walks, park visits, and green-space exposure yield cumulative mental-health gains. E.O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia—love of life—frames this effect: humans evolved to thrive in biodiverse environments. When cities erase greenery, we lose not only habitats but our own capacity for humility and perspective.

Practical implication

Start small: notice clouds, a tree’s geometry, or the rhythm of running water. Regular doses of wild awe cultivate physical health and existential calm.

Nature’s vastness teaches humility and resilience—qualities humanity needs to address ecological and social crises alike.

Music and synchronized movement create one of the most accessible forms of awe. When you sing, dance, or walk with others, your body rhythms and emotions align, producing collective effervescence—Durkheim’s term for the electric sense of unity among people acting as one. Keltner’s modern examples range from Daybreaker dance mornings to taiko drumming and Gandhi 3.0 pilgrimages.

Sound and Physiology

Auditory stimuli directly engage your body. Crescendos and harmonic shifts trigger chills, tears, and heart-rate synchronization among listeners. Yumi Kendall of the Philadelphia Orchestra calls music a 'cashmere blanket of sound'—it enfolds and unites. Shared listening synchronizes neural patterns in the audience’s brains, predicting closeness.

Synchrony as Social Glue

Moving or breathing in unison amplifies empathy and cooperation. Walking together increases rapport, tolerance, and endurance. Awe-walk interventions with older adults not only reduce anxiety but also visually shift attention from self toward surroundings. Even chaotic events—mosh pits, protests—show emergent order through self-organizing patterns.

Practical insight

To build collective awe, summon rhythm: sing, march, sway, or walk together. Synchrony turns isolation into shared meaning.

Music and movement are human technologies of awe. They compress emotion into rhythm and coherence, reminding you of what Durkheim called 'the sacred within the social.'

Visual art and design capture awe and store it where societies can revisit it. Artists and architects build environments that reveal vastness, beauty, or injustice, allowing moral knowledge to endure beyond the moment. Keltner connects neuroaesthetics with social repair, showing how images and geometries trigger awe and empathy.

Patterns, Light, and the Sublime

From Vermeer’s domestic light to cathedral symmetry, visual design exploits geometry to engage both mind and body. Sacred patterns—hexagons, spirals—hint at causal depth and unity. Burke’s distinction between beauty and the sublime explains art’s dual power: beauty comforts; the sublime provokes awe.

Art as Moral Archive

Artists like Susan Crile and Leda Ramos use art to hold terror and injustice at aesthetic distance. Crile’s Abu Ghraib series forces visceral empathy without panic; Ramos’ murals document immigrant resilience and collective identity. Research shows art framed properly reduces amygdala threat response and increases moral reasoning. Public art correlates with well-being and giving behaviors years later.

Designing Awe for Everyday Life

Hospital paintings and urban design that evoke wonder improve health and community. Even cityscapes judged beautiful or complex predict better mental well-being. Awe embedded in environments elevates public morale and generosity—architectural care becomes social medicine.

Core claim

Art transforms awe into civic empathy—the emotion becomes archive, meaning, and action.

Design and art are not decoration; they are ongoing invitations to moral imagination.

Spiritual awe—the sense of divinity or unity with a larger force—acts like compost for belief: old doctrines decay, insights distill, and new practices grow. Reverend Jen Bailey’s metaphor of 'composting religion' captures this lifecycle, echoed by William James’s classic accounts in Varieties of Religious Experience.

Decay: Letting Go of the Default Self

Extraordinary experiences—mystical visions, near-death episodes—often start by dissolving old certainties. Jen Bailey and Malcolm Young describe faith’s renewal through surrender, where ego and dogma break down. That’s composting’s first stage: decay releases nutrients for insight.

Distillation: Noetic Knowing

Next comes distillation, the ineffable recognition that something sacred is present. Yuria Celidwen’s near-death vision—earth, darkness, and a seed placed under her tongue—illustrates meaning crystallizing from mystery. Mystical awe provides compressed symbolic truths that communities retranslate into tradition.

Growth: Ritual and Community

Finally, growth turns insight into practice: chanting, caregiving, theology. Roshi Joan Halifax’s Being with Dying trains compassion through presence with suffering. Awe becomes enduring spirituality rather than fleeting emotion.

Psychedelics and Controlled Mysticism

Modern research on psilocybin confirms awe’s reproducibility. Studies by Roland Griffiths show most participants report life-changing mystical unity when guided safely. The key mechanism mirrors other awe states: deactivation of the DMN, release of fear, and surge of openness. (Set and setting determine whether awe heals or terrifies.)

Practical lesson

Spiritual awe is living ecology—decay frees, distillation reveals, growth sustains. When handled with care, it connects private wonder to collective ethics.

Mystical experiences and psychedelic studies together suggest that awe—and not doctrine—is the renewable resource of faith.

Birth, childhood, and dying—these are awe’s physiological and existential thresholds. They remind you of continuity between beginnings and endings, and that existence itself is a shared miracle.

The Awe of Birth

Nancy Bardacke’s mindful birthing program treats labor as a sacred encounter, rich with oxytocin and vagal calm. Awe reframes pain into presence. Evolutionarily, human helplessness at birth enlists extensive caregiving—an awe design built into biology.

Childhood Wonder

Rachel Carson’s call to 'help your child to wonder' urges you to cultivate curiosity through nature and play. Awe fosters imagination and resilience. Childhood awe is training for lifelong openness.

The Awe of Dying

At life’s end, awe helps transform fear into meaning. Roshi Joan Halifax’s principles—bearing witness and compassionate action—teach presence with suffering. Near-death accounts often mirror mystical awe: dissolution, light, and moral clarity. Keltner’s own experience of his brother’s death illustrates bittersweet transcendence.

Consoling insight

Awe at thresholds turns fear of loss into reverence for continuity—the natural cycles that bind all living things.

From first breath to last, awe records life’s transitions in our bodies and communities as sacred choreography.

Keltner ends by showing awe as an epistemic emotion—a way of knowing. When you feel awe, your mind shifts from the fragmented to the relational; you start seeing systems rather than parts. Charles Darwin’s final paragraph about the 'tangled bank' epitomizes this—the world reveals itself as interconnected processes.

Seeing Patterns and Relations

Awe-induced perspectives appear across disciplines: Humboldt’s ecology maps, Renaissance visual geometry, rhythmic dance, and music’s temporal symmetry. When the self quiets, perception expands into network vision. Empirical data show awe increases humility and ecological concern—psychological foundations for sustainable action.

From Emotion to Ethics

Awe connects personal feeling to planetary ethics. It teaches that meaning lies in relationships—genes within fibers, individuals within cultures, humans within ecosystems. That realization generates stewardship rather than dominance.

Succinct formulation

Awe integrates us into the systems of life—it is humankind’s emotional entry into complexity and interdependence.

To foster this shift, design experiences—art, ritual, nature—that reveal relationships rather than isolated facts. Awe teaches you to belong rather than conquer.