In his book [[From What Is to What If]], Rob Hopkins ends with a chapter on the experience of awe. > The root of the word is in Old English and Norse and refers to the sense of fear and dread we feel in the face of a divine being. Until the mid-1700s, it was reserved for religious experiences. Then Irish philosopher Edmund Burke used the word to describe vast, powerful things we don’t understand – it could just as easily be nature, looking at the stars or being moved by a piece of fiction or music. In 2015, Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of California wrote that central to experiences of awe are ‘perceptions of vastness that dramatically expand the observer’s usual frame of reference in some dimension or domain’. Here are 2 key features of awe: - a sense of vastness (of space, time, beauty, understanding or connection) that makes us feel smaller and experience a dissolution of the self - the need to adjust our understanding of the world, in order to accomodate the experience Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley professor of psychology, believes that we should strive to experience awe on a daily basis. Another researcher, Amie Gordon, estimates that people experience it on average once every 3 days. At a conference in 2016 called "The Art and Science of Awe", Paul Piff said, > ‘As we work to reverse these long-term socio-economic and socio-political trends to foster more connections to others, stronger communities, more pro-sociality and more kindness, in the short term it would make more sense to foster more experiences of awe, for ourselves and for others. It might, at least, serve as a shortcut to the kinds of psychological shifts that we’re hoping to bring about.’ --- Sources: [Piff. 2015. *Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior.*](zotero://select/items/1_EBNE5EMK) [*Why Do We Feel Awe?*](zotero://select/items/1_7NY7EVH2)