How Spiritual Life Grows out of Awe
As I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.
BLACK ELK
Twant me, โtwas the Lord. I always told him, โI trust to you. I donโt know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me,โ and he always did.
HARRIET TUBMAN
Growing up in a white town in Ohio, Jennifer BaileyโReverend Jen, as she is known todayโfirst felt the heat of racism when she was five. As she was jumping off a slide in a park, a classmate
asked:ย Why is your face dirty? She ran into Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and felt embraced in the quiet of that space. Years later in the same church, she would hear Sister Oliver play on the organ and feel that cashmere blanket of sacred sound. In these experiences, she awakened to a big idea:
I am beloved in the eyes of God.
In her teens, Bailey served the impoverished and unhoused. At divinity school she found inspiration in scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr, but felt agitated to transform Christianity into a more inclusive and diverse faith. Today her organization, Faith Matters Network, engages thousands on questions of spirit, faith, the soul, and the Divine. She ministers in skinny jeans, quoting Beyoncรฉ alongside the Bible and other sacred texts.
We speak on the phone during a fraught time: she is pregnant as COVID-19 is just overwhelming New York, proving particularly deadly to people of color. At the beginning of our conversation, Reverend Jen takes stock of spiritual tendencies today. The numbers of the religiously unaffiliated are rising, in particular among people in their thirties, like her. They donโt attend church regularly, follow a single dogma, or identify with one religion or another. It is an era of rising religious homelessness. At the same time, people today are deeply spiritual. This has been the case since humans began being humans, for relating to the Divine is a deep human universal. Two-thirds of young people in the United States, and 90 percent of all Americans, believe in the Divine, that some kind of spirit, or vast force, animates the course of their lives, and that there is a soul that persists beyond the life of the body.โโ
When I ask Reverend Jen where she finds mystical awe, her answer comes easily: the strength and courage of African American women. Her grandmothers fled the terrorism, lynchings, and segregated spaces of the Jim Crow South of the 1950s. Her mother, raised in Chicago, was a student in the first integrated high school class of the 1960s. In thinking about these women, Reverend Jen slows. She cites how the trauma of racism is passed from one generation to the next in the damage it inflicts upon the cells of our bodies. She expresses reverence for how African American women from the past and present overcome. They do so, she says, in spirit. Spirit they find in the kitchen. In telling stories, laughing, singing, and dancing. And in church. There, in soulful community, they โmake a way out of no way,โ as one of her grandmothers liked to say.โ
It was faith that sustained these women. Faith in God. In love. In justice. In hope. She feels this spirit today at spoken word events, in coffeeshops, at improv shows, in music, and at the dinner table. And most recently, at the โdie-insโ she has led to call attention to police brutality. She feels guided by spirit, as Harriet Tubman did leading slaves to their freedom.
As Reverend Jenโs story of awe makes its way to the present, she pauses. After a brief silence, she reflects: โI guess I amย composting religion.โ
For thousands of years we have relied on nature metaphors to describe mystical awe, the feelings of encountering what we call the Divine, what we feel to be primary, true, good, and omnipresent. In some Indigenous traditions, Hinduism, and Taoism, for example, images and metaphors of the sun, sky, light, fire, rivers, oceans, mountains, and valleys are invoked to explain the Divine. Here is Lao Tzu describing Tao, the vital life force, or โwayโ:โ
Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefitting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way.
Reverend Jenโs metaphor of โcomposting religionโ may feel particular to our twenty-first century of organic farms, urban gardens, plant-based diets, and farmers markets. Composting, though, is thousands of years old. When we compost, we gather raw materialsโfood scraps, grasses, leaves, animal manureโand let them decay in a place of storage. Over time, microorganisms, bacteria, fungi, and worms break down the raw materials, consuming what is toxic and distilling a humus, an amorphous, sweet-smelling, jellylike black mixture of plant, animal, and microbial origin. The nitrogen of humus is absorbed by the roots of plants, nourishing life.โ
Reverend Jenโs composting metaphor suggests that mystical awe follows a pattern of decay, distilling, and growth. This would seem to fit her own life story, of breaking down the sexist and colonialist strains of Christianity, distilling a spirit she found in the faith of African American women, and growing mystical feeling with others in her ministry. Perhaps our own experiences of mystical awe, or spiritual experience, if you like, follow this pattern of the decay of the default selfโs preconceptions about the world, which results in the distilling of some essential feeling that gives rise to the growth of our own spiritual beliefs and practices. Perhaps the 4,200 religions active today are doing much the same, transforming in a process of decaying, distilling, and growing as cultures and humans evolve.
Spiritual Humus
When Malcolm Clemens Young was in sixth grade, he and his classmates traveled to Ashland, Oregon, to attend a few Shakespeare plays. At night, they camped. At four oโclock one morning, Malcolm awoke and wandered outside his tent. In the quiet of this moment, he was awestruck by the patterns of moonlight on a nearby lake. In recalling this event, Malcolm told me what he wondered about in that moment of natural awe: โWhat could create such beauty?โ A beauty that he could โfeel at any time.โ It felt like an โextraordinary gift from God.โ
In his teens, Malcolm read the Bhagavad Gita, the Sutras of Buddhism, Thoreau and Emerson, and the Bible many times. After graduating from college, he had an unfulfilling stint as a financial consultant, so he enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. There, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he tells me, he lived a few houses away from where Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his historic Harvard Divinity School address on July 15, 1838. To only a handful of faculty members assembled, Emerson exhorted people to let religious dogma decay and go in search of their own distilled experiences of mystical awe:
The perception of this law of laws [for Emerson, that a benevolent life force unifies all living forms] awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that the Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.
For Emerson, mystical awe is intertwined with natureโmountain air, the scent of rosemary, hills, the song of stars. It heals like myrrh (a resin extracted from trees used as incense and medicine). It is the provenance of virtue, more so than cold thought or science. It is a pathway to our highest happinessโof feeling integrated into something larger than the self.
Malcolm would make his way to becoming dean of Grace Cathedral, which sits augustly atop Russian Hill in San Francisco. Over lunch, I ask Malcolm about his earliest experiences of awe, hoping to catch a glimpse of a spiritually inspired child and hear of visions, perhaps, or callings, or premonitions in dreams of a young mystic. After describing his experience by the lake, he smiles broadly and tells me about . . . the first time he dunked in a pickup basketball game.
And then it pours out: Walking around the countryside of Davis, California, where he grew up. Roads at night under expansive skies. Storm systems coming in over that flat Central Valley farmland. Emersonโs Harvard Divinity School speech. And moments of awe that day: in prayer, surfing, riding his bike to Grace Cathedral, passages from the Bible, the form-shifting fog that embraces San Francisco in ever-changing geometries. I ask Malcolm what it is like to work in a career whose bottom line is mystical awe. He has no real interest, he answers, in proof, dogma, definition, or debate over the semantics of termsโโIs there a God?โ โIs there a soul?โ โWhat is sin?โ โWhat is the afterlife?โ He points his finger
outward to some sense of space around us:
I get to be with people in the most intimate moments in their lives. When someone dies. Or a baby is born. Or I am standing next to two people at the altar. I say this is God, right here, around us. . . .
My last sermon was on decolonizing the mind, in honor of the Kenyan writer Nguหgฤฑห wa Thiongโo. We have histories of colonialism and slavery. Those histories are rooted in our minds. Gays have felt this self-condemnation for decades. Such shame.
But there are no good or evil people. That is what history has given to us.
This Sunday after my talk, an eighty-year-old man came up to me and was crying. He hugged me.
That is awe.
In this moment from Malcolmโs life as a minister, we see decay (breaking down the legacy of colonialist and homophobic beliefs), distillation (the feeling that led the elderly man to break down in tears), and growth (that simplest expander of interconnectedness, the hug).
In high school and college, Malcolm carried William Jamesโsย The Varieties of Religious Experienceย around with him, tucked under his arm, which (for good reason) provoked teasing from his friends. Malcolm Clemens Young was composting William Jamesโs experiences of mystical awe from 120 years ago.
James was raised in a nineteenth-century New York family who had the means and free-spiritedness to wander and wonder. He went to experimental schools. He lived with his family in Europe when he was a child and then studied art when he was eighteen. Alongside these privileges, James suffered from anxiety of every kind. Panic. Self-doubt. Generalized anxiety. And a claustrophobia that led him to find window shutters unnerving unless they were opened to just the right degree. In his twenties, James was so beleaguered by severe depression that he contemplated suicide.
James would begin a lifelong search for what he would call the fundamental cosmical IT, or mystical awe:
But it feels like a real fightโas if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem.
For James, there is an experience to be had, one of mystical awe, that is wild and beyond the ideas of the default self and societyโs status quo.
Seeking such โwild in the universe,โ James listened to talks by itinerant spiritualists. He attended seances. Inspired by amateur philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, James experimented with nitrous oxide. This drug activates the opioid system, which produces feelings of merging, and GABA, a neurotransmitter that energizes thought. In a rush of nitrous oxide, James called out:ย Oh my god, oh god, oh god!ย The anxieties of his default self were decaying. With the โtattered fragmentsโ of words he described what was distilling as โthought deeper than speech.โ He had discovered mystical awe through a drug we get at a visit to our dentist today.
These experiences are what led James to gather and curate stories of awe. He compiled personal accounts of encounters with the Divine, so often stories of inexplicable and at times extraordinary experiences, from ministers, writers such as Tolstoy and Whitman, acquaintances, and ordinary citizens. He would present his thinking in the Gifford Lectures in 1901 and 1902 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and from these talks publishย The Varieties of Religious Experience, the most revolutionary book on religion from the twentieth century and a touchstone for those who study religion today.
In this book, James defines religion as โthe feelings, acts, and experiences of men in their solitude. So far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.โ Religion is about our experience of relating to the Divine, which James describes as vast, primal, and enveloping. We can find these feelings, of bliss, oceanic love, grace, terror, despair, doubt, confusion, and mystical aweโin almost any context. In all religionsโHinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Jainism, the many forms of Christianity, Islam, Sufism. In nature. In music. In ideas. And even in chemicals that we put into our bodies. His thesis is one of radical pluralism; the pathways to mystical awe are nearly infinite. Everyday mystical awe.โโ
Just over a hundred years later, a new science of religion has concerned itself with this most complex cultural form, focusing on things like beliefs
about God, ceremonies and ritual, dogma and explanation, and the historical evolution of religions. And William Jamesโs focus and ours, mystical awe.
Mystical awe often originates in inexplicable experiences that transcend the expectations of the default self. Experiences like Jamesโs with nitrous oxide or Reverend Jenโs upon first entering the sacred space of a church. Or for Mark Twain, a dream of his younger brotherโs death; two weeks later his brother would die in a riverboat accident, and be buried in Twainโs suit as he had dreamed. Or inexplicable visions, such as those of Bernadette, a desperately poor girl living near Lourdes, France, in the nineteenth century, who had eighteen visions of the Virgin Mary in the darkness of a cave that led her to discover a spring whose waters had healing powers (today five million people make the pilgrimage to Lourdes each year to be healed by those waters). In survey research, most people report having had such inexplicable and extraordinary experiences: they have sensed the presence of God or spirits, or heard the voice of God, or felt that remarkable turns of fate are guided by Divine forces. On two different occasions in my early months of grief, I distinctly felt Rolfโs large hand on my back.โโ
Mysterious experiences like these require explanation; our minds are impatient with the unexplained. This tendency to explain has given rise in different cultures to spiritual belief systems about illnesses, bodily sensations, sounds and sights, and mysterious forms of consciousness, like dreams or hallucinations. To pick one of many examples, the rich tradition of ghosts, demons, goblins, and spirits in Japanโknown collectively as yลkaiโoffers ever-changing, very local explanations in supernatural forms that make sense of inexplicable sounds, lights, natural events, bodily states, or the feeling of being watched in darkness.
This thesis lies at the heart of the scientific study of religion and spirituality: that we rely on ancient cognitive systems to transform extraordinary experiences into beliefs, images, descriptions, and stories about the Divine. We attribute unusual experiences to the intentions and actions of an extraordinary actor, in this case a deity or deities. An earthquake becomes a god shaking the earth. Remission from cancer is theโ
intervention of God. Moved by wild awe, ten-year-old Malcolm Clemens Young felt that God had given him the beauty of moonlight on a lake.
Our sensory systems shape inexplicable experiences into perceptible, supernatural forms. When weโre in the dark, or looking at clouds, or taking in the swirling lines of bark on trees, or marveling at the geological patterns in rocks, regions of our brains may lead us to perceive faces where they are not, and these we take to be images of God. Our deep-rooted tendency to hear the human voice may lead us to hear the Divine in an exceptional wind or an awesome thunderstorm. When alone in an eerie or strange place, most likely at dusk or in the dark, we may feel seen, or touched, or even embraced, by Godโreflecting the activation of our ancient attachment-related tactile system. Out of mysterious experiences, our minds construct a sense of the Divine, an all-powerful being that is watching us, hearing us, speaking to us, and embracing us.โ
As mystical awe unfolds, the default self dissolves, a shift in self-awareness that William James called โsurrender.โ This has been found in studies in which through different means people are led to feel mystical awe, and activation in the DMN is observed with measures of brain response. These studies find that the DMN is quieted when Carmelite nuns recall a mystical experience, devout people pray in the lab, religiously inclined individuals contemplate the Divine, or meditators engage in contemplative practice. Mystical experiences not only deactivate the default mode network; they also activate cortical regions involved in experiences of joy and bliss. When overtaken by mystical awe we may feel goose bumps, tear up, tremble, or shake. We may bow or look upward and raise our arms to the sky, vestiges of seeking embrace. Sometimes we even call out, or quietly observeย wowย orย whoa, close relatives of the sacred soundย om.
This experience of mystical awe, this spiritual humus, is deeply shaped by culture, history, place, and ideas of the times. A geographical landscape and local flora and fauna will influence the metaphors, images, and beliefs that are our representations of mystical awe. Mount Fujiโs majesty gave birth to a sect of Buddhism that worshipped it, shaping the practices and beliefs of that spiritual community. The well-chronicled mystical
experiences of Aua, an Iglulik Inuit, were colored by his frozen, barren physical environment and a reverence for other animals that harsh food scarcity can bring.
Saint Francis of Assisiโs mystical experiences arose in the context of the thirteenth-century fascination with stigmata, the appearance of wounds on the body resembling those suffered by Christ on the cross. While fasting, Saint Francis had a vision of an angel with the stigmata on its hands and feet, and saw similar patterns of blood surfacing at the skin of his own hands and feet. This extraordinary vision led him to an experience of mystical awe, in which he felt himself to be merging with Jesus on the cross. (One wonders, though, about the malaria circulating in Italy at the time, one symptom of which was blood surfacing at the skin.) Mystical awe is shaped by concepts of the self, society, and body at the time.
Advances in science and technology feed into the cultural evolution of mystical awe. Today many people think of their soul in terms of patterns of energy, fields, entanglement, and vibrations, concepts given to us by Einstein and quantum physics. Perhaps our soul is a โquantum self,โ a pattern of vibrating energy that emanates out of the cells that are our bodies, energy that originated in the big bang and that lives on after we die. Economic ideas about free markets, choice, and hedonic pleasure in relation to mystical awe can be heard at the pulpit on Sundays in certain forms of Christianity, mindfulness movements, and profit-oriented psychedelic retreats. Mystical awe is always composting in the decaying of what we know and the growth of what is new.
Intelligent Design
Extraordinary experiences, and the ways we distill them, can give rise to new spiritual beliefs and practices. Out of mystical awe grow representations, images, symbols, music, and stories about the Divine.โ
Yuria Celidwen knows this firsthand. Of indigenous Nahua background, Yuria grew up in Chiapas, Mexico, raised by her father, one of Mexicoโs celebrated poets, and her mother, a professor of clinical psychology. When Yuria was eight, her mother was killed by a teenage driver, leaving her family in deep grief. Her grandmother Celina took her out into the lush forests of Chiapas, some of the most biodiverse in the world, where jaguars roam and enjoy sacred standing. Her grandmother opened Yuria to mystical awe, she tells me, to the songs of โgrowthโ and โbreathโ in the forest.
In her teens and twenties, Yuria fell into an arty scene in Mexico City, of music, late nights, wild gatherings, and drugs. One evening she nearly died. Studies of near-death experiences find that they follow the patterns of mystical awe, of decay, distilling, and growth. Carefully read Yuriaโs story of awe, her recollection of what happened, and notice the references to vastness and mystery (โpitch blackโ; โsky opensโ). And the chills (โLightning fires up my bodyโ). And threat (โSwarms of fiery antsโ). And the dissolving self (โI become waterโ). Here is the beginning of her story.
I blacked out . . .
The earth breaksโpitch blackโunder my feet. The sky opensโpristine clearโabove my head.
My body is shaken by massive involuntary movements. Lightning fires up my body.
Swarms of fiery ants, millipedes, worms, tiny roaches . . . critters of the underground crawling over me.
Light dances behind my eyelids. It flows . . . never static.
My body also loses form. I become water.
My limbs have been absorbed into the ground. I cannot feel my body.
A high-pitched, piercing sound fills my ears. Water evaporates.
Thirst draws the moisture from my tongue. I feel cold, burningly, laceratingly cold.
Yuria would regain consciousness but could not move her legs. Her friends could not make out the sounds she was uttering, and hurriedly took her to the hospital. There she would lose consciousness again, and float to a realm of different laws of space, time, and causality.
My eyes dissolve in smoke.
I am falling into thick, dense fog. I am becoming space . . .
At my arrival to the ER, my body is unresponsive.
Itโs a mirage of an understaffed health center in a developing country. No one seems to notice that I am aware.
An eye above my body opens.
It sees nurses, doctors, and the ghosts.
It also sees my parentsโfar awayโand a few relatives and friends. None of whom knows I am here.
No one can hear.
A few life memories come too,
shortcuts projected in the innermost screen of light. The nurses strip me of my clothes.
They trade them for a surgical bracelet with no name. I almost hear their thoughts before they speak.
โNo,โ they say, โno vitals. Sheโs gone.โ But I am not!
I am here . . . am I here?
Everything seems to fade.
Also fades the grip, the anger, the grief. Instead, only a soothing moonlight peace. Floating . . .
Melting into twilight . . . In the liminalities of space dwells the spirit bare . . .
I had yearned for this feeling so long, and now itโs finally here.
Lucidity
Pre-dawn skies
Luminous, resplendent, bright
. . . love . . .
At the end of this extraordinary experience, Yuria is visited by her grandmother:
She places a seed below my tongue.
โIt is a medicine for sorrow and despair,โ she says, โlet it sprout.โ It is my grandmother that comes from the dead . . .
A primordial egg cracks and water flows. Lord Chaahk and Bolon Dzacab laugh loud.
The Sun of Wind strikes me with his lightning. I take my first breath.
The defibrillator sends lightning through my body. My heart beats. I am awake.
In this decaying and distilling, Yuria would be animated by growth. She would go on pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world, often traveling alone as an Indigenous woman. She carried out PhD scholarship on funerary rites, charting deep patterns in the Day of the Dead ceremonies in Mexico and Tibetan water rituals, in which we touch and hold on to the remains of the dead. Today she works for the United Nations on Indigenous rights. In her spare time she is preserving cloud forests in Chiapas.
When I ask Yuria about her experience, she explains it as a โnekyia,โ a journey narrative that pays homage to book XI of Homerโsย Odyssey
(โnรฉkysโ means corpse in Ancient Greek). In most religions, Yuria explains, there are representations, in the form of stories, legends, poems, and myths, about journeys to the afterlifeโHades of ancient Greece, Sheol or hell in the Abrahamic traditions, Valhalla for the Norse, the bardo in Tibetan Buddhism, the Mictlรกn for the Indigenous Nahua, or Xibalbรก for the Indigenous Maya. A nekyia journey, like a near-death experience, involves decayโthe dissolution of the self; a distillationโcelestial feelings of ascent found in surrender, chaos, and death; and growthโwhen we return to our waking lives. Understood within the science of mystical awe, nekyia are stories we tell to make sense of the inexplicableโwhat consciousness is like when we near death. Many religious and spiritual traditions, Yuria tells me, from rituals to iconography, grow from our collective effort to make sense of the mysteries of life.
Grounded in this idea, we can consider how religious and spiritual practices grow out of experiences of awe, in fact in ways we have already considered. Our awe-related vocalizations become sacred sounds, chanting, and music, allowing us to symbolize and share feelings about the Divine. With visual artโsuch as that of myriad Mesoamerican traditionsโwe represent the sacred geometries perceived during mystical awe. We tell symbolic stories of gods in awe-inspiring dance. Yoga offers a series of body postures that often manifest our physical expression of awe, and that bring us the bodily feeling of the Divine, as in this story of awe from twentieth-century yogi and mystic Gopi Krishna:โ
The illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring louder, I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt myself slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a halo of light. . . . I felt the point of consciousness that was myself growing wider, surrounded by waves of light. . . . I was now all consciousness, without any outline, without any idea of a corporeal appendage, without any feeling or sensation coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of light. . . .
Bathed in light and in a state of exaltation and happiness impossible to describe.
Moving in unison becomes religious ceremony. Awe-related bowing, shaking, prostration, or looking to the sky give rise to ceremonial acts of reverence. Such rituals bring about a shared physiology, feeling, and attention to being part of something larger than the self. Muslims practicing the salat (the bowing performed five times a day) showed increased activation in the areas of the brain associated with acceptance, reflecting their sense of being connected to a Divine force that is larger than the self.โ
These many ways of representing mystical awe often come together in community spaces of awe-based intelligent design, of representations, symbols, and rituals that enable the collective experience of awe. The religiously inclinedโabout 60 percent of Americansโfeel mystical awe at church, in prayer, when reading spiritual texts, while listening to sacred music, and when contemplating life and death. People who do not identify with a formal religion create their own โtemples,โ finding mystical awe in nature, or in a collective activity such as singing in a choir, or in dance, as Radha Agrawal does. Or in meditating or practicing yoga. Or in music, as Yumi Kendall does. Today, the Divine comes in many forms.โ
The shared experience of mystical awe transforms our individual selves in ways that make for stronger groups. For example, empirical studies involving thousands of participants find that feeling a sense of spiritual engagement is associated with increased well-being, a reduced likelihood of depression, and greater life expectancy. And greater humility, collaboration, sacrifice, and kindness that spread through groups. Groups that cultivated these tendencies through forms of religion, a new line of theorizing contends, fared better in competition with other tribes that did not, over the course of our evolution. More intelligent design.โโโ
The toxicities of communities that revolve around mystical awe are also well chronicled, and have given the world tribalism, genocide, and the subjugation of those outside of the favored groupโhistorically women,
people of color, and Indigenous peoples in more than ninety countries. Extractive and authoritarian forms of power, as well as charismatic sociopaths, often find revered places in communities of mystical awe. This is a truth Reverend Jen Bailey, Malcolm Clemens Young, and Yuria Celidwen know all too well, given their life stories and cultural backgrounds. They are composting religion in ways to allow for the decay of such tendencies, and to distill something essential to power the growth of beliefs and practices that unite rather than divide.
Psychedelic Awe
Bob Jesse used to be an engineer at Oracle. Shortly after arriving at UC Berkeley, I would learn over lunch that Bob had been transformed by experiences with entheogens: chemical substances, typically of plant origin and with deep origins in Indigenous cultures, that include, among many others, psilocybin, ayahuasca, peyote, and the synthesized drugs LSD, MDMA, and DMT. Knowing of my interest in awe, in 2004 Bob invited me to a retreat focusing on the scientific study of psychedelics.
My own psychedelic experiences were fast tracks to mystical awe, attempts to redeem William Jamesโs โsomething really wild in the universe.โ As if inspired by Emersonโs Harvard Divinity School speech, Rolf, our friends, and I threw ourselves into wonders of life while experiencing psychedelics, moving in a throbbing unison in the mosh pit of an Iggy Pop show, marveling at movements of grains of sand amid the loud roar of the Pacific, hearing the sounds of Mozart outdoors merge with the light and scent of eucalyptus trees, wandering through an exhibit of kindergartenersโ art in Golden Gate Park, witnessing a shorebird die from an algae infection and move through what we perceived to be the dance of death.
One experience of psychedelic awe stays in the cells of my body to this day, a trip Rolf and I made in our early twenties in Zihuatanejo, Mexico,โ
where Timothy Leary escaped to when on the run from the law. We went on a journey to โEl Faro,โ the lighthouse, a fitting direction for us: my mom taught Virginia Woolfโs transformativeย To the Lighthouseย in her classroom. After taking a small boat to the isthmus on whose faraway point El Faro stood, we walked past dozens of red crabs dug into holes, each throwing out radiating balls of sand to mark its territory, which it defended with absurdly large claws, and we absorbed their strangeness and beauty. A fallen tree in the sand, perhaps a small manzanita, now gnarled driftwood, reached out to us, its smoothed branches leaning, yearning, seeking touch, intending and aware.
On the trail, we walked several miles with a precipitous view of the ocean to our left. The Pacific Ocean was illuminated. Magenta bougainvillea pulsated. Arriving at the lighthouse, sweaty and sun warmed, we stood inside in a small circular space with two windows peering out. The oceanโs horizon vanished into pure, refracting light. The roomโs white walls glowed in the brilliant sun of Mexico. A roar of wind and waves surrounded us, echoing, hovering, moving, repeating. On the windowsill sat a piece of pink soap and some rusty nails.
What decayed for me that day was โthe interfering neurotic, who . . . tries to run the show.โ I experienced inexplicable and at times extraordinary sensationsโa wind; the embracing, powerful sun; the porous boundaries between Rolf and me; entrained rhythms of breathing, side-by-side strides, and the regular crunching of footsteps. And a sublime laughter about lifeโs absurdities breaking into fragments of sound that vanished in the wind. The distilling of transcendent feelings of brotherhood.
Some fifteen years later in Mill Valley, California, I sat with a cluster of scientists wondering how to study psychedelic awe. One of the first questions we entertained: How do we measure mystical experience? Thankfully, Ralph Hood was on hand. Ralph, it has to be said, bears a striking resemblance to Walt Whitman. He had translated the writings of William James, and scholars of mysticism who followed, into, of all things, a questionnaireโโHoodโs Mysticism Scaleโโwhich would figure prominently in the new science of psychedelics.โ
The next question: Do psychedelics really change people? As with many experiences of awe, people say they have been transformed by psychedelics. The alternative hypothesis, though, is that peopleย thinkย they have changed but actually revert to personally ingrained habits of thinking and feeling. William James hinted at this possibility, that mystical awe reveals our individual temperaments: some mystical experiences, he observed, are more optimistic (think Walt Whitman) and others more pessimistic (think Leo Tolstoy). Today, a prominent theory holds that during times of transformation, our identities emerge more forcefully to construct experience in the present moment. This reasoning yields an ironic prediction: Psychedelic experiences make us more like who we are, rather than changing us in any enduring ways. Mystical transformation is an illusion. Out of the decay of these extraordinary experiences, we simply distill who we really are.
My Berkeley colleague Oliver John was in attendance, a specialist in the study of identity change. He had a hunch: psychedelics make us more open to experience. This tendency is captured in statements such as โI come up with new ideas,โ โI am fascinated by art, music, and literature,โ and โI am original.โ People who are open to experience, studies show, are receptive to ideas and new information, are innovative and creative, are often moved to chills and tears by art and music, and are inclined toward empathy and generosity. The defining emotion of openness, you probably already guessed, is awe. Perhaps psychedelics open us up to openness.โโ
Neuroscientist Roland Griffiths listened carefully. Over the course of several years, with Bob Jesse quietly assisting, Griffiths would distill in a first, field-shaping experiment what is at the heart of the psychedelic experience, mystical aweโgiven to us by Indigenous traditions that are thousands of years oldโand see whether it promoted growth in the studyโs participants. In a double-blind experiment (one in which experimenters and participants alike were unaware of which participants got what), the participant received either psilocybin or a placebo. The participant relaxed on a couch for eight hours during the journey, listening to music with eye covers on, with a therapist and guide nearby. What is called the โset and
settingโโhow people are oriented to the experience and the comfortable context in which it takes placeโwere carefully implemented.
In this study, 13 percent of the participants receiving psilocybin reported feeling intense fear. Sixty-one percent of the participants reported a mystical experience that day. That is, on Hoodโs Mysticism Scale, they reported that they:
had merged with some kind of force larger than themselves, encountered fundamental truths about life,
felt a sense of reverence for what is sacred, experienced intense joy and awe,
and experienced timelessness and a dissolution of boundaries between themselves and the world around them.
This finding has been replicated: across studies, 50 to 70 percent of participants report that psychedelics produce one of the most significant experiences of mystical awe of their lives.
And, yes, people grew. When compared to their self-assessments before the study, two months later participants who had ingested a small serotonin-altering chemical had become more open to experience, their minds and hearts more open to big ideas, music, art, beauty, mystery, and other people. I donโt think there is another experience that produces mystical awe with such reliability except, perhaps, watching the birth of a child, nearly dying, or dancing with the Dalai Lama.
Since Griffithsโs breakthrough experiment, one line of studies has looked to psychedelics as an approach to our most complex struggles, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and PTSD. Psychedelics have been found to reduce levels of depression and anxiety, as well as the fear one might feel when living with a terminal disease. Eighty percent of smokers smoke significantly fewer cigarettes after a guided psychedelic experience. People struggling with alcoholism drink less. Psychedelic experiences make us less likely to commit crimes.
How might psychedelics open our minds to the wonders of life? One straightforward thesis championed by University of Alabama at Birmingham scientist Peter Hendricks and Johns Hopkins scientist David Yaden is that the magic ingredient is awe. In keeping with this thinking, UC San Francisco neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris has found that psychedelics consistently deactivate the DMN, thus revealing that a core phenomenological dimension to the psychedelic experienceโego death, or vanishing or disappearing selfโhas correlates in shifting brain activation. Psychedelics, like awe, reduce activation in threat-related regions of the brainโthe amygdalaโfreeing people from the threat-vigilance of trauma, or obsessive ideas, or addictions, or even the awareness of the certainty of our own mortality. Psychedelics lead people to feel greater common humanity and perceive fewer distinctions with others. These compounds lead us to be more altruistic up to a year after a guided journey, and more curious and open to others. With these plant medicines, given to us by Indigenous cultures thanks to their thousands of years of composting the mystical awe found in these molecules, we do indeed redeem โsomething really wild in the universe,โ something very close to our โhighest happiness.โโโโโ
Awe Walk in India
In 2010, Nipun and Guri Mehta sold everything they had from their life in Silicon Valley and walked 600 miles through villages in India, in 120-degree heat and monsoon downpours, living on one dollar a day. The married couple was walking in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhiโs salt march, when he marched 240 miles to the sea with tens of thousands of fellow protesters to grab a handful of salt in defiance of the British Salt Act of 1882. That protest, powered by moral beauty and moving in unison, would dethrone English colonial rule. Political collective effervescence indeed.
Over lunch one day, Nipun described to me the mystical awe he felt on this pilgrimage. Impoverished villagers would always give them foodโ humanityโs first act of moral beauty. In a graduation speech at the University of Pennsylvania, Nipun distilled what he learned on this awe walk into the acronym WALK: Witness, Accept, Love, and Know thyself. In the vast and mysterious 180-degree view of life one finds at two miles per hour and in Kierkegaardโs โchance contactsโ with strangers, we discover mystical awe.
In 2020, Nipun invited me to a retreat he named Gandhi 3.0, to take place in Ahmedabad, India. The invitees included scientists, government officials, tech leaders, and people working in nonprofit organizations. And so, with my twenty-year-old daughter, Serafina, I made the sixteen-hour-flight to be part of Gandhi 3.0, held at the Environmental Sanitation Institute (ESI), a couple of miles from Mahatma Gandhiโs ashram. This modest institute was built to bring toilets to India, in reverence of one of Gandhiโs most impassioned causes, to champion nationwide toilet access (in his era, so-called untouchables composted the feces of people in castes above them). The entrance to ESI is a museum of toilets, with annotated photos, models, flow charts, and histories of toilet and sewer systems. Posters provide lessons about the life cycles of composting. The toilets in our rooms composted our waste, feeding the lush grounds of the ESI.โ
One day, at Gandhiโs ashram, we sat quietly in the sand-filled square near the Sabarmati River, where Gandhi meditated each day. We reflected in the room where he wrote at a small desk, spun wool, and took in the view of a courtyard outside. From such a modest room came vast ideas that would inspire Martin Luther King Jr. to acts of courage, which would stir Berkeley students in 1964 to free speech protests of moving in unison, which would nourish the student antiwar movement, which would pave the way in the swinging pendulum of history for Ronald Reaganโs rise to power. History so often follows the ebbs and flows of awe.
On one day of the retreat, I interviewed two sisters under the warm surround of a banyan tree, the national tree of India. Trupti Pandya, the younger sister, had read of Nipun and Guriโs pilgrimage and decided to set
out on her own. Her older sister, Swara Pandya, begrudgingly came along, worried what her younger sister might do. Over five months, Trupti and Swara walked 1,600 miles along the Narmada River, called โmother,โ like many rivers in India. Along the way they were fed and housed by strangers. For Trupti, our greatest illusionโthe scarcity mindset of modern lifeโ began to decay. Extraordinary experiences distilled each day. The riverโits currents, reflections, swirling light, and rushes and hissesโsounded like the voice of God, telling Trupti that life is guided by โa gentle, kind force, every step of the way.โ She and Swara created rituals: greeting the river each day, expressing gratitude to families who opened their cupboards to feed them. In visits to temples, Trupti held pebbles that had been touched by the feet of pilgrims. She felt moved, empowered, fearless, and alive. She now works in a shelter for young women who have been battered and abandoned. Decay, distilling, and growth.
On the last day of Gandhi 3.0, we took part in an awe walk that composted beliefs and practices from around the world. We walked around a dark, leaf-covered pool where rainwater was collected. Following Buddhist tradition, we took four steps and then bowed and touched our foreheads to the ground. Many of us touched trees as we passed by. Toward the end of this thirty minutes of silent moving in unison, volunteers invited us to take a handful of salt from a large pileโmimicking Gandhiโs own act of righteous courage. Bowing with forehead on the ground and eyes looking to the side, I made eye contact with Jayesh Patel, who directs the ESI built by his father, who was raised by two women who caught Gandhi in their arms when he was assassinated.
We then moved to a clearing where we all sat in silence. I felt touched by the sun on my right cheek and forehead. In nearby lush plants and trees, growing out of my composted waste, birds sang a web of sound; I could almost hear in their songsย woo-hooย andย whoa.ย A gentle breeze rushed down from the trees and over the grounds. I could feel myself dissolving into the bright sky, surrounded and embraced. I sensed Rolf smiling and spread out in the sky and distributed in the light. In relation to something beyond words. Redeeming something wild in the universe. And kind.
