4) The Power of Awe — How to get it and Why it Matters
Exactly how awe and tripping work.
Subtraction
Awe happens not by learning, adding, or seeking anything more. Instead, awe breaks through when we subtract one thing. That one thing is our ego. Babies are tripping because they have not yet developed an ego. Near-death experiencers also “trip” because when they die, presumably, their ego dies too. Psychoactive explorers are tripping because psychedelic drugs cause “ego dissolution.” One Buddhist practice substitutes “autobiographical” information, in essence our ego’s storylines, with present-moment awareness. Yogis attain awe through “meditative absorption” by halting the thought waves of our mind’s heavy-handed ego. Even the humble punchline works by subtracting ego projection for an instant.
Gaps in Ego Projection
All the tripping, all the awe that occurs seems to be associated with gaps in ego projection. I suspect that awe will always burst through when there is no ego to oppose it —since the ego is functionally a separation device that, by definition looks for differences, often with suspicion. But awe is a connecting force. While the ego stops at the surface and makes grandiose judgments of others, awe allows us to see through the surface to our inherent oneness. Awe is the connecting tissue of the soul, linking us to the wonder and vastness of our lives, our planet and the universe. It’s not a fleeting dream or aspiration, it’s our baseline that we have perhaps, long forgotten.
Releasing the ego’s tight hold on our mind frees open a world of possibilities the ego had shut down. The magnitude of this shift unleashes an optimism and reflection so profound it stops us in our tracks. Once we experience this level of awe, we can't unknow it. When the ego’s rule attempts to resume, it simply has no credibility. The untethered see the world in a new way; many described life changes that are completely transformative.
But how does the ego run such a tight ship with so few gaps in its projection? First, the ego is in charge of projecting the past and future into our minds: Worrying about what happened can result in depression; what might happen can cause anxiety.
But such judgments are not an “all the time” obsession. After all, we’re not judging and reacting all the time — but the ego is projecting over the present all the time. If the ego was not projecting the past, when we looked at a tree, we might see a vibrating, living creature in astonishing colors ego had hidden. This happens when we manage to turn ego off.
Once, we did see “tree” for the first time. Likely, we were very young, and “tree” remained an unqualified wondrous experience of awe up until our ego formed. When ego puts on its blinders, wondrous trees fade into ego projections of past trees — blurry, indistinct, prerecorded. And what applies to trees also applies to people:
What does ego show you when seeing a friend or foe? Ego projection rolls out the blurry replays into your mind, constructed out of your old verdicts.
Truly you are seeing no one; you are meeting with only your own past judgments. Given the tree example, without ego, how would a living, full-blown human appear?
Now, with an understanding of how ego projection works, how pervasive it is and what happens when it lapses, we can fully understand why the second baby (from Part Two) failed to produce awe. It also explains how the second anything often produces dullness, let alone awe. As we revisit the new mother, we now see awe hit her by accident in the case of baby number one:
The moment our heroine held that first baby, her ego was caught off-guard. This “birth” thing, it was new, and the ego had nothing to project. There was a flash of silence in which the new mother’s ego was momentarily speechless.
In this rare, brief lapse in projection, the ego’s worst outcome occurred. A sliver of egoic dead-silence permitted a pesky beam of awe to break through the ego’s cloud of projection, instantly revealing the awe it was shielding.
For babies two and three, ego had already mapped a past reference of “birth,” — baby one prepared it. So now her ego was ready for projection over baby two, three, and for that matter, over reality, wonder, and awe. So, the cause of awe is not novelty but dissolution of the ego, specifically its projection, and the ego’s timekeeping control where everything is late, stale, and dull. A dissolved ego produces a range of effects from greatly enhanced perception, continuous, wonderous “novelty,” a multi-dimensional experience of life, and deep peace, interrupted by bursts of joy.
Scientists suggest at least one sustained experience of awe can “reset” your brain. Further, the “awe-reset” extends beyond mental health into human flourishing, conveying optimism, wonder, and insight. Our “brain-on-awe,” as Michael Pollen wrote, transforms our perception. Awe shakes “the snow globe,” says Robin Carhart-Harris, a leading scientist on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.
Luckily, for us to get the awe-reset, neither psychedelics, briefly-dying, or a return to toddlerhood is required. The mechanism-to-awe appears to be at least a temporary “ego dissolution.” Meditation, yoga, and spirituality offer established, benign pathways to “control/alt/delete” our overbearing ego. During the reboot, in moments of ego silence, awe arises automatically and may transform us forever.
