He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. —Albert Einstein
Don’t let yourself ever get used to it…stay amazed! — Joyce Meyer
Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me. —Immanuel Kant
I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge or Virtue or Goodness or Victory but something even greater, more heroic: Sacred Awe! —Nikos Kazantzakis
To be in awe is to be in heaven, and to be in awe now, as an adult, is to be surprised once again by the pixy-dust glister shown all around to our long ago, privileged childhood eyes. Along these lines, those of us who have walked in the Christian tradition have heard or read the first verses of the The Christian Bible’s book of Matthew, Chapter 18. Jesus’s disciples had been bickering (reportedly their usual pastime) about who was the favorite among them. Whereupon they asked Jesus, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
I imagine Jesus rolling his eyes at that moment and muttering something under his breath, like, “Didn’t we discuss this just yesterday?” or, “This project may be much easier if I choose instead to have women disciples.”
Yes, I digress. However, as the story goes, Jesus then asked a nearby child to come stand among them and commenced to admonish his beloved disciples, “Except you become as little children, you shall never enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3.)
When I Googled for a common takeaway interpretation of this passage, predominately, it seems present-day Christianity wants people to believe Jesus was telling his highest-level stalwarts to recognize their sinfulness and convert. Upon reading this idea, I blurted loudly that their version makes no sense: this band of men were apparently Jesus’s closest confidants. Instead, I prefer another interpretation I’ve heard many times: that Jesus was telling his friends to ease up on impediments to childlike awe and wonder.
Please indulge me another digression here: When doing research for this post I learned that, for the most part, the stories of the New Testament were spread by word of mouth for several generations before written accounts emerged.1 Most of the New Testament’s books were written anonymously during the Christian infighting of the second century, and many were scribed by the numerous opportunistic writers of that era, who turned to forgery to add weight to their versions of what must have occurred during the life of Jesus.2
The New Testament itself declares that Jesus’s highest-ranking apostle, Peter, was illiterate— so how could he have written all those Bible stories attributed to his pen? Additionally, only seven of thirteen letters credited to the Apostle Paul were actually written by him, and, the book of Matthew, as another example of outright forgery, was assigned to him, not because of any connection to Matthew. Rather—as the story goes3—this moniker was used because Matthew had been a Jew and the tone of this particular anonymous writing sounded Jewish.
With that said and, no matter which history book you choose to trust, I hope you now agree with me that, just as easily, Jesus, the master teacher, would have seized the moment. He would have responded to his as-yet naïve and/or blinded and primarily illiterate disciples, by saying something akin to, “…until you turn away from your pride and toward the vibrant, able-to-be-wowed humility evident in this child, you will never experience heaven.”
Indeed, it has been the opportune welling up of childlike awe and wonder in receptive individuals that has ignited the beginnings of our great religious traditions. This is a paraphrase of James P. Carse,4 the late American academic who was Professor Emeritus of history and religious literature at New York University. Ironically, though, maybe after the passing of Jesus, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), Muhammad, the great guides of the Hindu and Jewish traditions and other teachers, their simple messages were soon assigned secondary importance by the residual organizations of devotees. Although original intentions were to provide guidance toward a heavenly (eg., enlightened) state, over a span of either decades or centuries, did the devotees who then achieved elite status in the hierarchy of these resulting organizations become the chief hindrances to heaven’s requisite awe and wonder?
Perhaps history’s foremost example of this possible phenomenon is that of the Christian hierarchy’s attempt about four hundred years ago to censor Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). In his old age, Galileo became the target of the Christian power elite and—all-the-while—he was likely the preeminent living reminder of the mystical relationship between childlike awe and the process of achieving heaven.
Galileo had no army nor other means of threatening the pope or his power-wielding court of cardinals. “But his effect on the history of civilization cannot be exaggerated.”5 This story is emblematic of the tension between wonder and the world’s belief systems. Galileo’s curiosity and forever-engaged awe at the physical world led him on a tireless, lifelong fact-finding mission. He accepted nothing as a settled conclusion. In contrast, Galileo’s persecutors, Pope Urban and his elite ecclesia, refused even to peer into Galileo’s telescope.
To have acknowledged Galileo’s mountain of research findings, these accusers would have had “to admit that their precisely stated beliefs had no durable substance but were arbitrary inventions that falsely claimed the quest for truth had been completed. By declaring Galileo a heretic they painted themselves with that very brush.”6
Jesus’s kingdom of heaven is likely interpreted somewhat differently by each of us. So also are the relationships among awe, curiosity, wonderment and a thirst for truth. Worked into this mix are acknowledgement that even if our knowledge is vast, our ignorance is vaster still, and, that individual processes of awakening are as varied as the flower blossoms sprinkled about our landscapes. May it be said, though, that for any of us to enjoy a process toward a more heavenly state on Earth—Galileo style—attention should not be lost to any of these attributes, despite one’s religion, and no matter what or to whom or how or if worship is involved?
However, the hopeful, lifelong, ever-awestruck process we call heaven ought to have its most natural home in the great religions, right? As examples, for the Buddha, enlightenment meant the never-ending advancement to ever higher levels of purified mindfulness; “Brahman, the sublime deity of Hinduism, is so transcendent that it cannot be defined except to say it is ‘not this and not that’ (neti neti); according to the Tao Te Ching, life is a journey that stops nowhere and is of no permanence; the repeated phrase of Muslims, ‘by the will of Allah,’ reflects an awareness that there is no predicting what that will may be; the rabbinical tradition in Judaism is a discourse of many thousands of voices, but a discourse in which no one has the final word.”7
However, here are a couple of perhaps feather-ruffling questions to ponder:
- Is it the nature of organizations—whether spiritual, humanitarian or scientific—to become stuck in systems of beliefs and hierarchies that often choke-off the flow of wonderment, innovation and the flowering of timely truths? Thus, leg-tethering their legitimacy?
- No matter how inspired are their beginnings, do budding religious organizations—again, by their very nature?—soon retreat into rigidity, begin to take pride in their supposed favor with god, abandon emphasis on a present-moment heaven on earth and preach of after-death rewards instead for the faithful, and become consumed with the organization’s perpetuation?
Would Galileo have nodded a misty-eyed yes in agreement with these notions? His biographers portray the powerful Christian gatekeepers of his age as having made every effort to extinguish his childlike zest, his passion for finding truth. Gotta ask, had the sixteenth-century church become a demonic force in opposition to its Bible’s promise, “…and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (John 8:32)?
It seems there’s no escaping a tension between accepted “truths” and the process of awe and discovery. Yes, of course, we never do escape the march forward of eternal process. But, we humans often become like troops of automatons comically and tragically clinging in resistance to its flow. With this picturing, our hoped-for heavenly state becomes merely the absence of resistance, the letting go and, one’s euphoric awe at having awakened once again to participation in the present-moment. In this picture, heaven reoccurs when we awake to being an essential bloom in a field of flowering processes within other processes and, finally, within a sublime unfolding—for which there are no words.
One element of this awe-inhibiting resistance phenomenon is it seems there is something about us that makes us so easily seduced by belief systems—sometimes religious, sometimes not—calculated to either assuage our insecurities or cleverly manipulate us, having read our addictions to power and/or control. Along those lines, one of the most famous quotes of Karl Marx, the 19th-century German philosopher and socialist revolutionary, is “Die Religion… ist das Opium des Volkes,” which is commonly translated to English as, “religion is the opiate of the masses.” But, it seems to me that Marx was incorrect in saying religion is the opiate. A religious person, during her or his humble service of others, study, ritual song and dance, and daily devotion might be enjoying heavenly bliss equal to Galileo’s. Instead, isn’t a rigid set of beliefs the opiate Marx speaks of—sometimes religious, sometimes not?
Ever-improving his telescope, Galileo peered into it to discover something besides heavenly bodies. Likely, he was awed again and again by the vastness of the universe, which, in turn, illuminated the vastness of what there is to learn. I imagine him awed and humbled at each expanded horizon by the widening scope of things unknown.
Coinciding with his discoveries, Galileo‘s process toward a heavenly state of awe was surely informed by a then-famous essay, De Docta Ignorantia, written two centuries earlier by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64). Nicholas was a man of comparable stature in his time to that of Galileo during the seventeenth century. Basically, Nicholas had written that our discovery process proceeds by means of making comparisons of finite things. Knowledge, he had said, is an understanding of how finite things relate to one another. “No matter how many of these relations we might perceive, they will never add up to the infinite. Hence, the infinite…is unknown; for it escapes all comparative relation.” In summary, awe is our most natural state, for we will forever remain ignorant, despite our relatively vast knowledge and know-how.
Along these same lines, I have often thrilled at the idea of Truth with a capital T. I picture this Truth as overarching, infinite, indivisible. My view is of Truth as inclusive of all our facts and concepts, all our already-discovered truths that appear now within our present horizon. With this picturing, Truth is a composite of all our individual realities and yet, infinitely more. And, our intellect will never comprehend the vast numbers of yet-to-be-discovered truths so astutely that Truth may be grasped intellectually. However, Truth, as such, is at the core of everything we experience, and may be easily accessible to us as a spark of joy and wonder when we embrace life as Galileo did, and to children when surprised—their eyes popping with luminous awe.
Of course, the beyond-words vastness of that which sparks awe is infinitely greater than what may be described here by my feeble attempts. Because we are all immersed in All-of-It, however, undauntedly, we attempt to find words to describe it. (Question: Is the term God—with a capital G—just another feeble attempt at putting our finger on that which is also in our fingers?)
It’s difficult to imagine any of our Galileo-like progenitors, those who have lived heaven—long ago and recent—not being entirely awestruck when prompted by their privileged gaze. One awestruck Roman philosopher, Plotinus (204/5–270 AD), spoke of “the real as One; the only way we could observe it is to be separate from it, and to be separate from the One is to pluralize it, in which case it is not the One we are observing.
“Plotinus, though a pagan, had a strong impact on medieval thought and especially the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics. To know God, they typically said, is to be God; therefore, not being God, all things divine remain forever hidden from us.” Much more recently, “Kant taught that since we cannot know a thing as it is in itself, the ultimate nature of the world is finally inaccessible to the rational mind. Nietzsche scoffed at the very idea of objective knowledge, declaring that it is only the result of creative thinkers and not a representation of anything.”8
And, in hopes of juxtaposing today’s research findings to the reflections of great teachers and thinkers through the ages, we have the work of Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being, also known as the Greater Good Science Center. He summarizes, “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”9
Keitner’s research illuminates many of the guideposts along the path to a more frequent and abiding awe experience. We must practice living-in-the-moment, focusing our attention on all things wondrous, practicing mindfulness and seeking novel experiences outside our zones of comfort.
However, we might expect that for each of us, awe will be realized differently. For some, it will be thrilling to the wonders of science. For others, it’s nature in the wild that sends chills up our spine. For many, awe is achieved most readily when in an art gallery, listening to stirring music, reading gorgeous prose and poetry, noticing blow-your-mind architecture, and/or in spiritual practice. Also, Keitner’s research suggests that the most reliable source of awe is to take notice of the moral beauty of other people.
I suggest there are at least three other practices for rousing goose bumps:
- With Galileo’s embrace of life as our model, we can be an active participant in building a better world, imagining ourselves, at least figuratively, placing one of the stepping stones on the pathway for others on their journeys to awe and a present-moment heaven.
- As I noted in a prior post, prevailing cosmology portrays the Universe as being cyclical and, also, galactic-scale activity during the Universe’s eventual collapse back to seed-like will have lasting effects beyond the next big-bang reemergence. And, we might ponder, alongside scholars and philosophers alike, that this model of how things work at that grandest scale is mirrored at all lesser levels, including our individual processes and the goings-on at the human-race level. We may frame our seeming human ”predicament“ as a mere step in a natural process—naturally, there will be an eventual decline, fall and reemergence for our species.
- Pondering how our own process is just one in a sky-full of blooming processes in a universe that is yet another blooming process. Often, the Universe is portrayed as holographic,10 in that, like when a laser is shone on even the minutest fragment of a holographic plate, the resulting hologram remains a nearly complete representation of the whole: all constituent parts of the Universe—no matter how minute—will behave quite the same as the totality. This portrayal stirs awe—at least for me.
We must stop and ask: Often, are our hopes and prayers futile attempts at thwarting forever, cyclic processes of seed to bloom to seed? Instead, might we realize more authentic hopes and joys while imagining that our collective Galileo-style gifts will be carried along, like light-as-musical-notes seeds upon a breeze, to become guideposts for humankind—whether next-up or reemergent? And, on this forever journey, just maybe, due partly to our having given our gifts, awe and wonder will forever effervesce.