The Deeply Personal Can Reveal the Universal Patterns that Empower Us to Act: Curiosity & the Transformative Power of Awe

I so enjoy writing and reading about subjects and experiences that are deeply personal, or that bring me greater insight, more than ones about hate and inhumanity. And I don’t think this is just me; it feels clearly true for most of us. When there’s so much in the news about DT and his fear and hate-filled executive orders and pointless cruelty, I need to also discover and support what feeds my sense of love and demand for justice and humanity. But it’s an awareness of the deeply personal that strengthens this sense of ourselves, this sense of connection with others and this world of ours. And it’s this awareness that fuels our ability to face what is most difficult to face.

 

One experience and emotion that particularly feeds and strengthens this deeply personal strength in ourselves is awe. Awe brings together a need to feel and preserve our sense of beauty, love, and wonder so we can face the destructive and horrible around us, to face realistically our fear of hardship and death.

 

Our brains are hardwired to worry, to perceive negatives, threats first. And according to research from the Greater Good Science Center, there are good reasons for that. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to be aware of any danger that might emerge from the world around them and prioritized this awareness. But to do that, they had to be ready, open to search beyond themselves, so they could discover ever more about themselves and the world. They had to let go of what they thought they knew to accurately perceive what they hadn’t known. In other words, they had to be curious.

 

And part of curiosity is that feeling we have before a discovery, that sense of not-knowing, worry, anxiety, and possibly fear of what might be there. Science has shown that our reward centers of the brain, and dopamine, our happiness and reward neurotransmitter, is released not only when we get the pleasure, the goal, but when we seek it. And when we feel wonder, awe at what we notice, the memories of and ability to be curious, is strengthened.

 

What is awe? Dacher Keltner, researcher and Professor of Psychology, writes about this in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. One definition of awe that he gives us is “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding.” It can transport us back in time or to a sound or aroma, or an epiphany that de-stabilizes our past understanding; that takes us out of our sense of being separate from everyone and everything else, and reveals the vastness around us, reveals an awareness of the mysteries of life.

 

Everything, every experience, says Keltner, originates in how our minds process information. Our emotions are those feeling states accompanied by thoughts, expressions, physiological responses which enable and direct our actions. When we’re locked into emotions about self-preservation or being selfish, feeling totally separate, this undermines our ability to adapt to present circumstances. Awe does the opposite. The sense of vastness, of something beyond ourselves integrates our scattered beliefs, and all the unknowns we experience, so we can create a thesis about the world, a deepened understanding of whatever we need to face….

 

*Please go to The Good Men Project and read the whole article.

Am I Good Enough Yet?

When I was teaching secondary school students, if I asked a class, “how often do you torture yourself by thinking ‘I’m not good enough’?” Students would laugh, smile with both embarrassment and familiarity, and then most would raise their hands in recognition. It was a good question to break open a group. But why is that?

 

Psychology gives us many reasons. We carry at least some degree of our past in our present. If people have said or done negative things to us often enough, we become conditioned to carry the hurt. If our parents and families have been dysfunctional, we can carry dysfunctional habits, guilt or blame. We hear other people in our heads—parents, friends, lovers, teachers, sometimes even strangers we meet on the street.

 

Evolutionary psychologists say we are born with a predisposition to look for faults. It is called a negativity bias. We are sensitized to look for any form of a threat as a way to actually protect ourselves from them. But this can lead to imagining we can ward off an attack by attacking ourselves first.

 

Our economic system teaches us to think of ourselves as our resume, as a list of achievements with a title above it, and as a marketable entity. Only those with a good resume are valuable—and we gain value by comparing ourselves to others and appearing better than them. So we think of ourselves as a continuing entity, as an independent being separate, distinct, and in competition with others.

 

But there’s even more going on here. Our mind plays a curious game with our sense of self. We see ourselves one minute as we imagine someone else might see us. And in the next minute, we see ourselves as this subjective, conscious experience. When we look at other people, they often seem consistent and stable in identity. From the outside, other people can appear as clearly defined, distinguishable, separate beings. They have the same basic face and figure, with a recognizable personality, tone of voice, and gestures. They, and we, respond to a name, a label.

 

But when we look at our selves, it is not so clear. We know we have different moods and emotions and that our thoughts about the world and ourselves can change rapidly. We know that we sometimes don’t know what to do and we can feel completely adrift. We know that when people ask us “How are you?” and we say, “I’m good,” that the reality is much more complicated and indefinable.

 

So we want to know how others think of us. We try to imagine how we look, how we seem to others. We expect our whole being to be as relatively unchanging to ourselves as other people usually look to us. We think we should be as clear on the inside as we imagine we are on the outside. As the Buddha and other thinkers have pointed out, we expect something from ourselves or from our notion of self that it can’t deliver, namely surety. This expectation masks who we are and makes us vulnerable to feeling something is wrong in ourselves, when nothing is wrong except the expectation. The view from the inside is obviously different from that of the outside. On the inside, it has to be at least somewhat mysterious, unknown, or we would always try to reproduce on the inside what has already been produced outside. To be alive and conscious is to face the unknown. To know what will happen is to mean it already happened.

 

Being conscious is a mystery, maybe the biggest mystery there is. ‘Con’ means ‘with.’ ‘Scio’ is from ‘sci’ or the Latin ‘scire’ meaning ‘to know,’ as in the word ‘science.’ ‘Conscious’ is thus ‘to know with.’ It is both an instance of knowing, and a knowing awareness knowing something. The philosopher J. P. Sartre said consciousness is always consciousness of something. Sartre makes the distinction between being-in-itself, being as an object, material, in a specific place and time, and being-for-itself, a constantly changing stream of awareness constantly new, as a relating or point of view.

 

And since to ourselves we are always partly unknown and indistinct, we try to do the impossible and fill the unknown with the already known, or fill the unknown with what we think others think. This is another reason why we might be so ready to judge ourselves negatively. It is easier to accept a negative image of ourselves than to live with no clear identity at all.

 

We are always both a whole, distinguishable being in ourselves, as well as a part in an inseparable, larger whole. It is the role of our senses to make us aware of the world, to show us the whole of which we are part. Yet, our sense of who we are shifts according to where we are and whom we are with. We rarely speak baby talk to an adult or sit unmoved when everyone around us is shouting. When we feel isolated, there is someone or something we feel isolated from. No other, no self.

 

We are constantly trying to place ourselves both in the position of the other and of our distinct self. We need at least these two contrasting viewpoints to allow the world to come alive. In order to speak sincerely and clearly, we need to hear and feel what is going on inside us, as well as understand how others feel—and hear and see us. At the deepest level, we feel most ourselves when we can be sincere. Yet, we feel most sincere when words come seemingly of themselves, spontaneously, unedited by ego concerns. In other words, we feel most ourselves when we aren’t concerned or worried about our self.

 

So, when we feel somehow not good enough, the first thing to examine is our understanding of what we mean by a self. Our sense of self is adaptable and ever changing. It allows us to harmonize with others and act appropriately in any situation we are in, to the degree that we recognize and value its shifting nature. We feel most ourselves, and feel good about ourselves, when its not “me” who speaks, but the world, the truth of the situation, the truth of “me” with “you.” And this is a verifiable type of truth.