Shake the Snowglobe — Six ways AWE Can Reset Your Life.
Part One: Popping open
What do psychedelics, near-death experiences, meditation, yoga and spirituality all share? Each can produce awe states which promote transformative human health. In this six-part article I will identify the common mechanisms-to-awe to reveal the most direct path to maximum benefits. We start with psychedelics and near-death experiences.
Awe hits you.
You are momentarily speechless.
Suspended in time.
A single dose of awe can change the trajectory of your life.
To understand awe, think of it like this: You’re on a plane and don’t notice that your ears have become blocked. You’ve lost a whole dimension of hearing, but don’t realize it. Perhaps you carry on conversations and even watch a movie. Then, during landing, your ears pop open. Suddenly, you understand what you’ve been missing.
Take that “popping-open” and multiply by 1,000. That is awe. Awe pops us awake when there is a specific clearing in our mind. Our senses seem to expand to take in an extraordinary, heightened awareness of a vast reality. Awe-experiencers describe feeling fully absorbed into something bigger than themselves.
After an encounter with awe, your problems, by comparison may seem of little consequence.
Scientists researching the phenomenon of awe have collected thousands of accounts from subjects who’ve experienced awe through psychedelics or by living through near-death experiences. Some subjects recounted gaining a comprehension of knowledge way beyond their normal capacity.
“Beyond all doubt, I felt a part of everything. I knew I was a valuable part of the great expanse of life.” Some of those who gave accounts knew they might sound cliché’ but declared with certainty, the cliches’ were true and accurate.
An interesting occurrence — shared by many — was the distortion of time:
Layers of unspoken communication were occurring all at once, yet I easily understood the knowledge transferred to me with no effort.”
Some subjects of near-death experiences astonishingly reported this complex level of communication even after medical doctors had deemed them brain-dead. Of those surviving a near-death experience, many felt awed and inspired. A few, after waking in their bodies, reported being a little disappointed without this enhanced form of communication: “Shit. All I have is a human brain again.”
As effectiveness of current drug treatments for psychological illnesses appear to be waning, awe experiences have proven so powerful that researchers are finding they may help people break patterns of addiction and produce longstanding mental health improvements.
“Afterwards, my addiction [such as alcohol, drugs, tobacco] now seemed petty, and in the context of my awe experience, trivial. I could not take them seriously anymore.”
The FDA has recently bestowed “breakthrough” status to MDMA and psilocybin-assisted therapies for demonstrating significant improvement versus existing therapies. And Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder may have found a meaningful therapy in MDMA. Two months after a trial, 67% reported no symptoms.
Researcher Stanislav Grof in 1980 predicting the potential of psychedelics in psychotherapy:
“Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy. These tools make it possible to study important processes that under normal circumstances are not available for direct observation.”
Three months “after awe,” many study subjects reported victory over their addiction(s) had lasted. Further, they believed the improvements would be lasting. Thus, rather than taking a pill x-times per week, a one-time awe-reset may provide months-to-lifelong relief from what researchers find is an ever-growing list of mental disorders, including anxiety, addictions and debilitating depression. Another significant theory involves an intense decision point: rapid and deep learning versus a fall into depression.
A new paper, Pivotal Mental States, describes what may happen when chronic stress and neurotic states build to a trigger moment of acute stress; potentially a “do or die” moment that forces a decision— two roads diverging. One road leads to a hyper-plasticity mental state “aiding rapid and deep learning,” such as an awe state — that results in a psychological transformation. The other road leads to “a descent into a potentially life-long psychotic illness.”
The pivot is thought to be an evolutionary function when under stress, but scientists hypothesize that certain psychedelics may produce the conditions in which rapid and deep learning and a long-term transformation can take place.
Another theory that may cause outsized results looks at the relationship between certain groups of illnesses — called trans-diagnostic potential. Trans-diagnostic means it may be possible to resolve whole swaths of disease at once. For example, awe can diminish death anxiety, which psychologists believe is “the parent” of many other disorders. Michael Pollan describes one case in his book, How to Change Your Mind (pg.356) where the fear of death ceased after an uplifting “trip.” Awe can resolve the fear of death by causing a change of perception — where connectivity, continuity and safety abound. When death anxiety is diminished, a broad spectrum of mental illnesses may also be solved.
In the use psychedelics however, there are some pitfalls to avoid which I will discuss in Part two.
