3) The Power of Awe — How to get it and Why it Matters
Babies are tripping all the time.
Lantern or Flashlight,
Wonder or Weary
Curiosity or Judgement?
Researchers suggest that newborns and toddlers are always in a state of awe. Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, who wrote “The Philosophical Baby,” confirms: “Babies and children are tripping all the time.” One theory is that babies and toddlers are born with “dramatically plastic brains,” and a lantern-like awareness; they are fascinated by everything and open to all possibilities. Surprisingly, Gopnik’s experiments have shown that toddlers were faster than some Berkeley undergraduate students at solving non-intuitive types of problems. Adults, being ever efficient, were able to quickly rule out the unlikely options but tended to miss the answer to puzzles with counter-intuitive solutions.
This wondrous capacity in children begins to decrease as the ego shifts their “bonds-with-all” state into a growing “separation with all” state.
The Ego
Researchers sometimes associate the ego with the brain’s Default Mode Network.
The ego is a separation device, concerned with “I, me, mine.” It is concerned with creating the “self,” the personality, and weighing others’ reactions to it. Ego helps protect the “I” from danger and slights, real and imagined. It uses many methods including projection of past and future, presumably for efficiency.
Ego can be negative and overbearing and may feed mental illness. In Freudian theory, ego mediates between our conscience and desires — between the “angel” and “devil” within us.
In cases of ego dissolution where psychedelics or near-death experiences were involved, some subjects reported a liberating sense of expansion beyond their body — but there was still an awareness of subject/object. In other words, they still had awareness of their identity, their own “spiritual social security number.” In the ultimate expressions of yoga, spirituality and meditation, there are egoless states said to result in a merging with all.
As children move into adulthood they come to see themselves as separate, autonomous beings and the ego heightens their reactivity and judgment of others and themselves. No doubt judgment has a utilitarian side, but it is sometimes at the heavy cost of well-being. Fun, fascination and possibly new levels of innovation may begin to vanish as self-absorption and routine sets in.
Scientists believe that the human baby’s trippy, lantern brain state is the primary human state — a state free of ego “controls.” Without heavy-handed ego control over our brain, human awareness lights up a lantern-like perception with a slew of newly-forming neural paths. However as we age, the ego wraps our brain with blinders; it calls-us-to-order into our ordinary, secondary mind. A focused flashlight awareness replaces the lantern, and the fewer well-worn neural paths grow thicker, dominating the “conversation.”
It can be argued the limited flashlight awareness of an adult brain is an evolutionary necessity to get anything done, and therefore worth the significant drain of brain-energy the ego and “default-mode network” require. It most likely took a great amount of focus to survive in the difficult environments wherein early humans had to grapple. So the ego evolved to focus our awareness on reproducing, and protecting and feeding the people!
Or… perhaps Terence McKenna’s stoned ape theory applies to the rise of humans — after all psilocybin mushrooms and other natural psychedelics grow naturally all over the world. Perhaps ancient Shamans shared psychoactive fungi and plants with their tribes on a regular basis — and these “stoned apes,” in their moments of “lantern” awareness, with numerous new neural paths, and a sharper sense of sight, had more successful hunts and inspired novel solutions to survival.
Author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, after his 1950s mescaline trip, described psychedelics as an “ego-reducing valve.” When ego is turned off, many other areas of the brain light up, making connections and producing awe states.
Entering the egoless awe state
In addition to being a baby and using psychedelics, there are other ways humans enter the egoless primary state, including near-death experiences (NDEs). Scientists see many similarities when comparing Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) to psychedelics — including intense “lantern” awareness. Researchers at UVA have interviewed and cataloged over 1,000 NDE experiences with data spanning 40 years, longer if you add the many accounts from antiquity. A typical near-death experience may start with a clinically dead person lying on an operating table, pulled onto a beach or into a boat, or, perhaps, on the floor after a heart attack, with no heartbeat, breath or brain activity. Then, the subject surprises everyone by waking up and describing a transcendent experience of awe that sounds eerily like the accounts of psychedelic trips.
Below, for awe enthusiasts, I’ve pasted The Near-Death Experience Scale from Dr. Bruce Greyson’s 1983 paper. His excellent new book is called, “After.”
Other egoless states of awe: “Awe-lite” occurs in temporary bursts, such as in the case of our new mother’s first baby and other “accidental” experiences. There are also “systems of awe,” that reduce egocentricity through meditative practices, such as Patanjali’s yoga “manual,” which we will touch on in terms of its awe potential. Yoga’s system of awe delivers samadhi; Buddhism aims at nirvana. Both include states of blissful awe. We will also peek into what spirituality has to say about awe.
From the examples in Part Two, we’ve established that jumping off a cliff in a wingsuit again or taking another bigger dose of your drug of choice, and chasing novelty are not going to get you to awe. The cause of awe is all about how well we can disentangle from a part of our brain that operates by default.
