Dacher Keltner on awe, humility and purpose
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Dacher Keltner on awe, humility and purpose
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I stumbled across Dacher Keltner’s work when I was first researching Enchantment, and now - for the final episode in this season - I’m honoured to speak to him about Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Hello, I'm Katherine May, author of Wintering and Enchantment, and this is How We Live Now, a podcast that looks for pathways through this post-everything world. Each season we ask a range of wise people a common question and roam around in the breadth and depth of our knowing.
Good morning. I don't know if it's morning for you. It's morning for me. It's quite early. I've come out to walk the dog before my day begins. There's always so much to do at the moment. It's the summer holiday, so my son is now at home, and it's lovely. It's really nice, but it keeps me very busy. Personal space gets hard to come by, and listeners to my podcast will know that personal space is exactly what I need in life, much of it.
I have a few projects underway to address that right now, which I might tell you about soon. But for now, we've come to the end of this season of How We Live Now, and it's been great. I've been able to talk to some truly wonderful people. It's been really interesting to explore the idea of enchantment with people with loads of different perspectives on it, and how we access it, and what it is.
For those of you that don't subscribe to my Substack, there was also a book club with Sharon Blackie who talks about enchantment too. It's worth seeking that out. It's been refreshing for me to explore the idea I've been working with in more depth, and that's the real privilege and pleasure of having a podcast, I think. It's also quite hard work making these kind of big projects that run alongside all the other things I do.
I have to say, I'm ready for a quiet summer. Just about to cross the road. It's getting noisy here. I'm ready for a lovely quiet summer. I'm ready to let go of a few things for a while, to take a rest, to live without too much direction for a time. As I've got older, I've learned to appreciate summer much, much more. I always hated it when I was young. I hated the heat, and I hated the lack of structure. I like to know what I'm doing, if that makes sense. I like to have a purpose. But as I've got older, I've learned to stop fighting the heat quite so much. I'm still not ever going to be someone that basks in the sun, but I can surrender to the warmth in a way that I wasn't able to when I was a little younger, and I've learnt to really appreciate what summer brings.
There is a sense of ease that comes over the world and kind of slackening of daily life. I guess people go off on holiday, everything loosens up a little, and a routine drops away. And now I'm a grownup, I like that. I like that letting go. I like that disappearance of that hard beat of everyday life that comes to feel so oppressive at certain times.
This week, my son finished school, primary school, so he went to this school for the last time, and it was an interesting few weeks. There was this sense that a process needed to happen, a process of letting go, of detachment. And everyone by the end of term was so exhausted, and it meant there was a kind of readiness for it, which felt really helpful. I think schools know how to manage that really well now. They get the children really tired, so that they can just gently let go. And so a lovely long hot summer, and then the work begins again in September. That's how it's going to be for me anyway.
So anyway, that's a long way of getting to introduce this final podcast guest of the season. A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking to Dacher Keltner, who is a psychologist who works on emotion, and in particular, his latest book is about awe, which it's hard to even conceive of as an emotion. It feels so other in lots of ways. It was really fascinating to try and unravel what that quality of awe is, what it feels like, what comprises awe, what it's made up of, and also to talk about how awe has affected both of our lives. The very rare moments of big awe which are, as Dacher's work explores, life changing generally, and really connected to purpose, and really identified with the core of us and core values, but also the practice of everyday awe.
I was really moved by the way Dacher had such an emotional connection with awe. He doesn't talk about it as a distanced academic, which is I know a stereotype, but he does talk about it in a very personal, intimate way. I think you're going to love it. Have a listen, and I'll be back in a moment to say goodbye for a couple of months.
Dacher, welcome to How We Live Now. I am delighted that you've been able to join us, because what might be slightly invisible is that when I began the research for my recent book, Enchantment, I started with a lot of your research about awe. That's before your book came out, so that's a delight. It was a delight to see the book come out at a similar time to mine as well, so we connected in ways we didn't know.
Dacher Keltner:
Well, I think there's good reason, because I think our world is in need of thinking about awe and wonder and what it brings to us. It's good to be with you, Katherine.
Katherine May:
Yeah, it's lovely to have you here. I wanted to begin by asking you more broadly about the area you work in, because you work in the sort of study of emotion, which seems to me to be a really complex area to study because it's a study of quite fleeting states, isn't it?
Dacher Keltner:
Yeah, thanks for noting that. Philosophers have been writing about emotions for millennia. It is just part of the human experience and the mind. Darwin wrote a famous book about emotion in 1872, and then scientists kind of shied away from studying these fleeting states, as you say, because they are complicated. They're ancient in our evolutionary history. They're metaphorical, they're poetic. So it's hard to study emotions, but we've made a lot of progress, including on awe.
Katherine May:
How do you catch people in the state of having an emotion? How do you bring those states about, or do you not?
Dacher Keltner:
Yeah, it's hard. It's really hard. Because, well, one is with laboratory techniques. You just take the case of awe. You can have people watch really beautiful imagery on a screen, listen to music, think about a past experience of awe. Our lab often tries to get outside of the lab and find people in nature. We've studied people rafting, and looking out at big views, or standing near trees, or out in the forest. You really have to get creative to find these fleeting states to study them scientifically. It's not easy.
Katherine May:
That's so interesting. What a strange job to do. These areas of study that people find themselves in are often never intended in the first place. I love that you got there.
Dacher Keltner:
Yeah. Who knows how?
Katherine May:
Yeah. Well, we could spend an hour talking about that. But let's talk about awe, because it's a difficult one to pin down. It's a word that we can use quite casually without fully understanding, I think, what it means. So first of all, how would you define it? What is awe?
Dacher Keltner:
Yeah, and thanks for complicating it.
Katherine May:
I love doing that.
Dacher Keltner:
No, rightfully so. Because I've studied emotions for 30 years, and we've had 15 years of research on awe. I don't think we'll ever, with scientific tools, get to its essence, but I do think we've made a lot of progress. We define awe as this emotion, and you rightly set this up as sort of a fleeting state that you feel when you encounter vast mysteries, things that are beyond your ordinary consciousness or frame of reference, and then it unfolds in a particular way that we've sought to understand with science. But I think that the simple way to think about, "How do I know I'm feeling awe?" is it's this feeling you have when you encounter something vast and mysterious.
Katherine May:
Is awe something that we might feel a few times in our life, or is it something that can be distilled more often? Because I can kind of almost identify two types of awe in myself. One is a very vast kind of almost a shift that's happened just a couple of times that I can think of that's been really life changing.
Dacher Keltner:
What's an example, just out of curiosity?
Katherine May:
The example that I always go back to is joining the march against the war on Iraq, which I think is 2001. I'd arrived late. The march was already going on, and I wasn't sure what to do or where to go, and so I just joined the crowd. I just walked into the crowd. I don't enjoy crowds, but this crowd felt different to any other crowd I'd been in. I was hit by this sense of vastness. I think some estimates say there were a million people there, but it was bigger than that.
Dacher Keltner:
That's incredible.
Katherine May:
It was this sense of common intent and joyful intent. Yes, people were angry about the war, but they were also joyful to be together, and everyone was singing and chanting. I was immediately welcomed into this huge crowd. It felt like being hit in the chest with something physical. I felt like I could almost be knocked over by it, it was so big.
Dacher Keltner:
Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah. And, Katherine, I love your observation, and science hasn't gotten there yet, but I think it's intuitive, which is what's surprising, and I write about this in the book, and one of the most interesting findings, I think, in the 15 years of research we've done, is actually people feel awe quite frequently, two to three times a week, more small, ordinary experiences of awe that are very important to our health and wellbeing. And then at the same time, there are these momentous forms of awe that you probably have two to five times in a lifetime.
I love your example of almost a transformative experience at a political march, a musical event. A lot of people think about childbirth in that fashion or watching somebody die. I think there are both these ordinary forms of awe that I call everyday awe. You could almost stop right now, look outside, reflect on the light of the sun, or whatever it is, and feel awe. And then there are these two or three times in a lifetime experiences that change our lives, which is fascinating.
Katherine May:
And so what's yours? What's the first? What's the big memory of awe that you kind of conjure when you're thinking about that huge life changing moment?
Dacher Keltner:
Early on, I had these experiences camping when I was six or seven, and forever after, I've found meaning in camping. I just freaked out with awe when I was a young kid outside of the LA County Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, there's this reenactment of a saber-tooth tiger and a wooly mammoth in the tar. And as a kid I was like, "There were beings like those things?" I got fascinated with dinosaurs, and evolution, and science. Just like you, I remember seeing Nelson Mandela freed from captivity. He was making this tour in the '80s, and being there with 50,000 people, and thinking about the end of apartheid I just started crying. It's interesting to think about the big sources and then the everyday forms of awe.
Katherine May:
Yeah, the shifts. So what are the bodily signs that we're experiencing awe? What is happening, and how do we sense it?
Dacher Keltner:
What a terrific question. William James, a great philosopher in America, really wrote about the bodily responses of awe. I love Walt Whitman writing about the soul being in the body, and that begs the question of, does this transcendent emotion of awe have bodily sensations associated with it? There's been a lot of progress on that very question. It's interesting. When people hear I study awe, some of them are like, "God, I don't quite know if I've had an experience of awe, but let me tell you about one. I was walking along and then I saw Brad Pitt and I got to give him a hug or whatever."
Katherine May:
That's different to awe.
Dacher Keltner:
Yeah. Okay, well maybe. Let me think of another example. "I saw this comet pseudo sort of..." And then they'll describe these bodily sensations of you tear up, which is a regular response of awe. You vocalise, that's a bodily response. "Whoa." You get this warm feeling in your chest; that is the vagus nerve that's activated by awe, which is this big bundle of nerves scientists are increasingly interested in that sort of slows your heart rate, deepens your breathing, calms your body. And then let's not forget the goosebumps. The chills are these little tingly sensations up your back and your neck and your arms that people feel with awe that are a very ancient mammalian physiological reaction where your muscles contract, fluffing up your fur if you have fur.
As I write about in this book, those aren't just random responses. Those are all part of this broader physiological response where you become more open to the world, more curious, and more interested in connecting with other people, which is right at the essence of awe.
Katherine May:
Do we understand the evolutionary function of that? Or do we understand it as an evolutionary function? Or is that still something we're not very clear on?
Dacher Keltner:
That's very recent scholarship, and thank you for asking. Because I like Darwin, and everybody who's followed really feel that these defining characteristics of humans have an evolutionary story to them. I think that there are really two important functions of awe. One is that it really integrates us into social collectives or groups. There is widespread consensus now in evolutionary scholarship that our sociality, our ability to form groups and relationships, is one of our signature adaptations or strengths. And awe fast tracks you. It just makes you feel like you're part of a tribe or a group. It makes you share and cooperate, even changes your sense of self, where you feel, like you described, going to the anti-war protests. Like, "I'm part of a collective."
The second function is a little bit more subtle, and I write about this at the end of the book, which is awe allows you to look at the world in a certain way in terms of, what are the systems out there that you might be part of? A social system, or a cultural system, or ecosystem. And that's really important. It helps individuals kind of integrate into a social group around you, or even an ecosystem where I'm learning how to be part of all the species that are part of an ecosystem. So awe activates this systems thinking, which is very important evolutionarily.
Katherine May:
Talk to me a bit about the default mode network, because I learned about that from Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind. It's so interesting to hear the connections between the science of psychedelics and the science of awe. There seems to be a lot in common there.
Dacher Keltner:
Yeah, and we can talk about that. I mean, it's funny because the psychedelic literature, and Michael Pollan is a dear friend and wrote a brilliant book. These spirit medicines, as indigenous peoples call them, or psychedelics, why do they make us less fearful about life and dying and existence? And now a lot of labs are starting to say that awe and transcendence, these feelings, are kind of the active ingredient of them. We can talk about that.
But the default mode network is an incredible discovery, and in particular in informing us about awe, which is when people feel awe, and it was fun to go deep into the writing about this, uniformly people write about disappearing and dissolving and the ego dying. Julian of Norwich, the great English theologian, had these spiritual experiences and she kept saying, "I am nothing. I am nothing." And that we find in our laboratory research that you just get small. You feel like you're not as consequential as you ordinarily think you are.
And lo and behold, that sense of self is registered in activation in this default mode network in the brain, which is big chunks of your frontal cortex and the side. And awe through nature videos, recollections of past experiences, psychedelics, deactivates the default mode network. I think that is liberating. It just frees you from the ego. It makes you open to the world. It makes you less self-critical and, in a sense, free.
Katherine May:
It's so interesting how it seems to be pleasurable for us to let go of this thing called the self, this domineering character that tells us what we are all the time. I'm interested in the link between awe and humility. They seem to be interdependent. Right?
Dacher Keltner:
Thanks for asking. Humility, having the right sense of proportion of your place in the world, you're not the center of the world, you're a small part of the world. And also, the second component of humility so important today is to be open and appreciative of other people, other forces in life, the qualities, the virtues of other people, and other forces that life has, fate, or environmental forces. Indeed, awe increases an individual's sense of humility, the sense of the right proportions of their place in life, the openness to other people's strengths and not anxiety about them or competitiveness about them.
Katherine, when I started to see these findings about awe, deactivating the default mode network, making us feel small and humble, you look today at the rise of the self and individualism and self-expression and arrogance, and all of the linkages between self-focus and anxiety and depression. And here's an emotion, awe, that just shuts down those tendencies and opens you up to the wonders of the world.
Katherine May:
I agree so much. I think often about how when I was younger, that experience of humility and feeling small used to be really painful for me and unsettling. I remember the first time someone told me that the universe was infinite and I hated it. I thought that was a vile thought, frankly. I couldn't get a handle on it. It was so horrible. And now I feel really comforted by thoughts like that, by my tininess and by my insignificance. That makes me less responsible for everything, which is deeply comforting to me. It helps me to just know my place. I know that's a traditional phrase to tell people to pipe down, but in a deeply wonderful way to know my place in the world and know my place amongst other people.
Dacher Keltner:
I think what you've just outlined, Katherine, is one of the great challenges of contemporary living and developing in life, which is to realise you're not the center of the universe, that there are these vast forces that you're part of, be it a family history or a culture you're part of, or the environment, what we're doing to the environment. Awe shifts our understanding from being anxious about being a small part of a vast thing to feeling empowered by that and enthusiastic. So I agree. I think that we need these reminders that you find in the great philosophical traditions like Hinduism, right?
Katherine May:
Yeah, sure.
Dacher Keltner:
The sense that my soul is part of a large soul, a universal soul, is very similar to this. Awe makes us see that more clearly, that these vast forces are just part of existence and interesting.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I'm often troubled though that, how do you put this? Increasingly we're performing awe for outside audiences, rather than authentically experiencing it. And then that becomes part of that whole process of ramping up our egos again. It's like, here's a photo of me in nature feeling awe, but oh look, I took the time to arrange a photo shoot around it. Oh, and by the way, this post is sponsored by these walking boots. It's like we seem to understand that awe is important, but I wonder if we avoid feeling it a little. I wonder if those feelings, if we let them in, feel too big for us sometimes and more than we can handle. We don't want that transformation that might come.
Dacher Keltner:
What a deep set of questions.
Katherine May:
Sorry.
Dacher Keltner:
No, no. And we don't know. The idea that awe is so transformative, I suspect that indeed some people shy away from the experience because it'll destabilize their view of the world and really impel them to consider new possibilities, and that's anxiety producing. I'm sure there are people who avoid awe.
Your second comment about kind of the Instagram awe, I think it's a deep one. The idea that there are these cultural means by which certain individuals commodify awe, they exploit it, they monetize it. "Here I am doing this wild surfing trip in Australia. Look at me." I agree, and that's fascinating to think about how that takes away from the power of awe.
But I'll note, it's interesting in writing this book, this is an old tendency in the Middle Ages and Renaissance era. There were Europeans who had these things called marvel rooms and curiosity cabinets, where they would collect all these awe-inspiring things usually taken from other cultures and show them off to their friends and say, "I've got the most awe-inspiring marvel room. Look at the sea tortoise from Argentina or whatever." That was another attempt at commodifying awe, which humans routinely do. It tells us we've got to find our own awe and give it away to people.
Katherine May:
That's so interesting, the idea that we can't stop trying to sell it, rather experience it.
Dacher Keltner:
Humans sell everything.
Katherine May:
Yeah, we do.
We will return to the episode in just a moment, but How We Live Now is part of a community, and I wanted to recommend another podcast that I think you'll love.
Penny Wincer:
Hi, I'm Penny Wincer, author and book coach and host of Not Too Busy to Write, the podcast about writing amongst life's many other demands. Join me as I chat with fellow authors of all kinds about their work, and most importantly, how they get the work done. Writing can be a lonely pursuit, especially when you're juggling other work, parenting, caring, a disability. Join us each Wednesday to hear how other writers from backgrounds of all kinds make it work.
Katherine May:
That's so interesting, the idea that we can't stop trying to sell it rather than experience it.
Dacher Keltner:
Humans sell everything.
Katherine May:
Yeah, we do. Yeah, I wonder if we always are very good at identifying it when it happens as well. And do we need to know it's happening for it to be useful to us?
Dacher Keltner:
That's a deep question, because how do you know you're having an emotional experience? They're complicated. They involve very ancient, what we call, brainstem processes, where you're interpreting the environment almost unconsciously, and then it filters up into the brain into the prefrontal cortex where you label the experience. So there's potential slippage in that process where you may be having a feeling of awe and not name it, not use your cultural understanding and language to make sense of it.
I think there are many occasions in which people are often unaware of their awe experiences. But for the most part, in our research we find that there is a coherence that when we name it, we're usually aware of the bodily changes that follow something in the environment. But there are going to be counter examples to that. Is it important to know you're feeling awe? I do. I think so.
Katherine May:
That's kind of tricky question. I'm sorry.
Dacher Keltner:
Well, that can be situated in this broader literature where people who have richer vocabularies of emotional experience, who have a greater awareness, say, activated in the prefrontal cortex when they're feeling things, tend to have more generative and useful experiences of emotion. It's like, "Oh, I'm really angry right now. Why is that? What can I do?" Or, "I'm feeling awe about this painting. What does it tell me about life?" So I do think awareness is a prerequisite to making the most of awe, but we don't know scientifically. It's too deep a question, Katherine.
Katherine May:
Sorry. I'm sorry. That's the areas for further research.
Dacher Keltner:
Yes.
Katherine May:
I can't help but think about the moments when awe fails us as well; those times when we go somewhere that we think is going to be awe-inspiring, but we are left cold by it. Or the times when maybe a creative artist produces something that's supposed to evoke awe, but it actually doesn't do that. Do we understand anything about the failure of awe? And can we reach too hard for it maybe?
Dacher Keltner:
Yeah. I think that there is this concern when you study these emotions that have such beneficial effects to be thinking about, "Well, what are the failures of this emotion?" Any human characteristic, our ability to do math, or to extend altruism to other people, can lead us astray. That's just the complexity of human existence. And awe fails us in certain ways. One is, it can lead us to see patterns that don't exist and to attach ourselves to charismatic figures who can really be bad for the world; you think about cults and Hitler and QAnon, and those are failures of awe and exploitations of awe.
I think that we don't know this, but in the happiness literature, there's this kind of emerging generalisation that the more we seek out stuff that makes us happy, the less it will make us happy. You can sort of sense that that might be true of awe, that, "Oh, I'm always looking for awe," and then it never quite lives up to that expectation. I will say, and this was really encouraging in our research, that we did a study where elderly people went on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, and they sought out awe in their walk; what was sort of wonderful and mysterious that they could go find on their weekly walk. They actually felt more awe over the eight week period. So I think yes, there are failures of awe, but I think if you approach it with some intentionality and wisdom, it'll bring you many benefits as long as you don't get too obsessed about it.
Katherine May:
I love the way that you say that awe is cumulative, that actually it builds up over a lifetime. That feels counterintuitive. It feels like it should be this rare thing that doesn't work as well the second time round, but it's a muscle that we can develop to receive it, I guess.
Dacher Keltner:
It is. And this, in some sense, was the most provocative finding in our work is, as I refer to earlier, of everyday awe. We studied people in several different countries, China, Japan, Spain, US, UK. We had them every night tell us, "Hey, did you feel an experience of awe today?" And the averages were two to three times a week they're feeling it. And then when you read the stories in their accounts of those experiences, it is this sense of, it's around us. It is looking at the sunset or walking by a classroom and you hear kids singing and it just kind of strikes you; the capacity for music, or like you said, just a sense of people bonding together to create community or social justice. So it's around us, and I've just been struck by that power.
We're just about to publish a study. Well, it's been just published, that we had healthcare providers who were in the heat of COVID-19 and the pandemic. These are nurses and doctors dealing with chaos and death. And in the programme they did, they just once a day thought about, "Just think for a moment about what's awe-inspiring around you." They felt stronger and less depression over the course of the period. So I think the book urges us to think, "What's awesome around you?"
Katherine May:
Does it make us do good more as well? Do we behave better if we experience? Maybe given that you've given the example of Hitler inducing a war as well, maybe it doesn't.
Dacher Keltner:
Well, it does in the local sense, in the sense that we've published a few papers, Paul Piff and others showing these little moments of awe. One of the things, it's interesting, when people have a big experience of awe like your experience at the anti-war protest. First of all, you feel like, "God, I'm part of this collective. I'm part of something larger." And very often people say, "I want to do some good in the world." William James called those the saintly tendencies of mystical awe. And then we've done these really nice laboratory studies showing little moments of awe. You share more with a stranger, you cooperate more, you feel more compassion for someone, et cetera. But then again, that's the local benefits of all, but then you have to engage in this broader consideration of, is that always good? With the Nazis sacrificing on behalf of Hitler, obviously that was problematic.
Katherine May:
Not so great.
Dacher Keltner:
We need to always be skeptical and think in the broader ways about what the emotion does for us.
Katherine May:
Well, like so many things, no one thing is the magic bullet for making us live a good life. It is about digging into the complexity and understanding that we need all sorts of inputs and ways of thinking, and we'll always need to be critical about everything ultimately. We can't ever let go of that idea that we can just coast along and expect the world to bring us to good. It just doesn't really work like that.
Dacher Keltner:
I agree. I agree. And John Hyde had his wonderful thinking about political and political morality is we have these deep feelings that tell us things. Like when you feel awe, ancient feeling, it's like, "Wow, there's this collective intention," that you refer to that I'm part of. And then we need rational discourse. We need social discourse to say, "Is that intention good?" I might feel awestruck by the latest electric car and forget to do the analysis of, "Well, what kind of energy was needed to create that car?" And so we need rational discourse too.
Katherine May:
One of the things that always fascinates me about awe anyway is that there is a kind of component of darkness embedded within it. Awe is something that could potentially, or we feel it as something that could potentially overcome us, that could engulf us; that's so big that we are afraid of it. That sort of ancient experience of awe is about the idea of looking into the face of God and understanding how they could crush you with their thumbnail.
Dacher Keltner:
There's so many. Awe is a positive feeling. It's really closest in our pretty sophisticated research with Alan Cowen on it's closest to interest and absorption and beauty and love and adoration. But little shifts in the meaning of awe can really move you into the realms of horror and terror and anxiety and alienation. If you suddenly have a sense of you're really anxious about giving up agency and being part of something large that's slightly largely out of your control, it can turn into a terrifying experience. Psychedelics has that, where you're awestruck by the visuals and the conceptual content of psychedelic experience, but then suddenly you're like, "Oh my God, I'm disappearing."
Katherine May:
I'm dissolving
Dacher Keltner:
Right, and you become terrified. So it is a complicated emotion, and thank goodness.
Katherine May:
I like complicated things.
Dacher Keltner:
Good, I can tell.
Katherine May:
I dislike the emphasis on happiness because I think it's so flat. The idea that we're supposed to be happy all the time just doesn't make any sense to me at all. It feels like skimming over human experience. Whereas when I think about awe, I feel something much more crunchy down there, and I like it.
Dacher Keltner:
I'm with you.
Katherine May:
So just to finish, because it is been so wonderful to talk to you, but you write a little in the book about how awe has been useful in your own life dealing with the death of your brother. Would you mind speaking a little bit about that? Because I found that so moving.
Dacher Keltner:
Thank you, Katherine. Yeah, it brings tears to think about it now. I had this wild childhood raised in the late '60s in a wild part of Los Angeles, and then grew up in the wilds of the mountains. My companion in awe was my brother Rolf. He was one year younger, and we just did everything together and had this remarkable childhood. And that continued through our lives. Then he got colon cancer and had a horrifying two years with that disease, and then passed away.
There were just two deep insights that I write about in the book, which the first was when I watched him on his last night alive physically I was sad and I was anxious, but I was awestruck too, as a lot of people are when just thinking about the end of life and the mystery of life and the mystery of death. I was comforted by our science, which finds around the world, the end of life is a source of awe. You're catapulted into this very reflective state.
And then what happened to me is when you really lose somebody young who's so vital to all of life for you, man, you head into struggle, and I was really lost. It was interesting, Katherine, and you rightly say this is a complicated emotion and complicated to feel it when you watch your brother die. But then also it was hovering in my experiences of grief where I felt him around me. I heard his voice. I saw him a couple of times. People during grief often feel like they see the person who's passed away. I felt his hand on my back.
And so in this really complicated state, I went in search of awe. I was just like, "I study this emotion. I know it's good for you. I'm not feeling it right now." And so I just changed my orientation to music and getting outdoors and thinking about people who really inspire me, all the sources of awe. It really transformed the grief. It gave me things I wouldn't have learned had I not sought out awe during grief.
Writing the book has just been so gratifying to hear almost daily from people who are like, "I lost my sister. I went in search of awe and found new meaning through that experience." So it was profound.
Katherine May:
Well, I think again, what you're expressing is the complexity of awe and that we don't get to talk about death very much. We're not often invited to talk about our complex response to that very complex thing that is so full of mystery and so unknown and so full of mixed emotions. Your account of Rolf dying reminded me of being with my father-in-law when he was dying, and feeling that, again, that kind of shift in all of life happening. That immediately felt like something very different to the everyday and to what I knew, and not entirely unpleasant, surprisingly.
Dacher Keltner:
Not at all. Not at all. I love that complexity about awe, that it's like, "I'm in deep pain, but at the same time, I'm tearing up at the wonders of this father-in-law's life or what he means to all of us here." This is why we do research in some sense, Katherine, is we kind of portray a complicated feeling, state, emotion like awe. We say, "Here's what it can do," and maybe it'll point to some awareness for people to find deeper meaning and grief or where their lives are going.
Katherine May:
Well, it's irresistible to say that it points us back to that interconnection that awe relies on in the first place, doesn't it? It's taking us into the vastness of humanity and the way that we are linked together in these experiences across all of human life as long as it's been going on. That's a pretty much definition of an awe-inspiring encounter, really.
Dacher Keltner:
It is. But just raising it up like what we share as fellow human beings, I mean, we lose sight of that when we look at our smartphone and all the nonsense of Donald Trump or whatever. And awe reminds us-
Katherine May:
It's very hard to lose sight of the wonder of humanity.
Dacher Keltner:
... exactly.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Well, Dacher, thank you so much. It's been amazing to talk to you. I'm so glad I had the opportunity. It's been lovely to roam around in the sense of what awe is, so thank you so much.
Dacher Keltner:
Thank you, Katherine. What a wonderful conversation.
Katherine May:
You know, it's funny. This year, it feels like summer has been shifted forward a little. As I'm speaking to you, it's the end of July, and already the weather seems to have turned. There are blackberries out in the hedgerows, which shocks me. They're early. They're definitely early. I've been watching on the news as temperatures are soaring across the world. So many places are literally on fire. Records are being broken.
I want to end this season with a moment of engaging with that change we're enduring at the moment, and how that feels to us, and kind of restatement of the seriousness of our work here, of the urgency of paying attention and feeling connection, and the sense that what we are talking about here seems very soft. We're talking about awe. We're talking about having a sense of magic. I talked to Amy Jeffs about mythology. I talked to Marjolijn van Heemstra about space and our practice of star gazing, which has enchanted us across millennia.
I suppose what I want to say at this moment and at this point in time, is that now is not the moment to walk away from that sense of magic, which I think is in many ways one of the defining human emotions. When we let it go, when we deliberately walk away from it, we walk away from a system of signposts that tell us to tune in, to engage, to pay attention, and to take care.
A couple of weeks ago, I quoted the artist Keith Haring, saying, "Money is the opposite of magic." I think that's a wonderful way of understanding the choice we have to make here between a life governed by materialism, by profit, by a culture of overwork, by the valuing of career above family, and by the political systems that encourage us to make that choice and force us to in many ways, by making it so hard to live a good life or any kind of life without access to increasingly large quantities of money.
Magic seems so silly when we're talking about all of these very serious things. But I'd like to suggest to you now as we close this series, that it's actually the biological marker of feeling connected. It's our body's way of telling us when we approaching something close to the truth of this life, this existence, which is the wonder of it all, the wonderful mystery of being human, and its enchantment that keeps tempting us back in to dance with it again, no matter how hard it gets.
Thanks for listening. Thanks to everybody who helped make this series. I'll see you again very soon.
That's all for this episode. Thanks for being here to explore How We Live Now. This podcast is presented by Katherine May, produced by Meghan Hutchins and Buddy Peace, with social media by Sarah Horner, and communications by Becca Pearce. Buddy Peace also composed the wonderful incidental music. And finally, if you enjoyed my podcast, please consider buying my new book, Enchantment. There's a link in the show notes. See you next time.
Show Notes
I stumbled across Dacher Keltner’s work when I was first researching Enchantment, and now - for the final episode in this season - I’m honoured to speak to him about Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.
Dacher’s research attempts to understand this very fleeting, ineffable emotion. He and his colleagues have shown that awe induces a feeling of being small within a vast universe - a radical shift into context. What’s more, by absorbing ourselves in awe, we become better people, more motivated to go out and do good. In this episode, we explore how it feels to experience awe, how we can seek it out in the everyday, and we share the personal experiences of awe that have inspired both of our books.
Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has over 200 scientific publications and six books, including Born to Be Good, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Power Paradox. He has written for many popular outlets, from The New York Times to Slate. He was also the scientific advisor behind Pixar’s Inside Out.
Links from the episode:
Dacher’s website
Dacher’s book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life
Other episodes you might enjoy:
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Enchantment - Available Now
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
