Awe

A May 2015 study, “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior,” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It found that experiencing a sense of awe promotes altruism, loving-kindness, and magnanimous behavior.

The researchers describe awe as “that sense of wonder we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.” That’s the power of an Intention. When we set ourselves a dream that creates butterflies in our stomach, we can forget the minutia of the world. The bigger house, the better car, the trimmings of a winning lifestyle are swept up naturally like space dust in a comet tail. We no longer have to set the goals as all these things become a natural part of the experience of creating an Intention. They happen anyway. That is the magic in the magic of thinking big. The fuel is TQT and nature.

Marghanita Laski found that the most common triggers for transcendental ecstasies come from nature. In particular, her survey revealed that water, mountains, trees, and flowers; dusk, sunrise, sunlight; dramatically bad weather and spring were often a catalyst for feeling ecstatic. Laski hypothesized that feelings of ecstasy were a psychological and emotional response that was wired into human biology.

Peak experiences are described by Maslow as “especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective.”

These descriptions reveal that a sense of wonder and awe are timeless and egalitarian. Each of us can tap into the power of nature and be awestruck if given the opportunity. Awe cannot be faked, and that is one of the many benefits of reconnecting with nature. Commonplace peak experience and feelings of ecstasy are a part of our biology that makes them universal, regardless of socio-economic status or circumstance. All we have to do is sit in solitude in the shade of a tree and feel the awe of it. Then we imagine our dream and powerful magic takes place. We don’t have to ‘do’ anything.

As we consider directing our deepening power at our dream we are best served placing our “self” in a state of awe as often as possible. In this state we can target anything and the bigger the better.

So, we have our dream, we feel awe. Now we need to create momentum to achieve it. The first step is to get into a state of flow, and we will discuss that next.

I love this video clip. There are other Jason Silva clips in the public domain, but this is one of my favorites. I think Jason Silva’s fast paced excitement combined with the frantic music demonstrates the ‘feeling’ of awe perfectly. His words, however, deserve repeated listening.

When we set ourselves a dream and begin to contemplate what life would feel like if that possibility arrived now, this is how it feels… ‘such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world to assimilate it.’

No one has said it better, and that is a perfect description of what you have been doing throughout this transformation experience. You have been re-configuring your mental models of a world you thought you knew so that you can be ready for real life to gift that dream you want so much. Not just the dreams, but the journeys, the experiences, the emotions, the raptures, the illuminations, the rhapsodies. Put together the dream has a feeling to it. When we think of what we really want we can feel it and the feeling fills us with awe.

If after doing the previous exercise you do not feel like this then you have not found your dream and you have likely not been honest about your source of motivation.

Don’t be disappointed if this is the case. Simply make another appointment with yourself and do the exercise as many times as you need until you get this feeling.

You have stepped outside your comfort zone and that has shocked your neurons into a new way of thinking. You have scrambled the self so that the world, the real world can seep through. It is indeed rhapsodic and you breathe it in…inspire yourself with the dream of what you want.

Below is a slide from a webinar I often run on the process of setting awe-filled Intentions. You’ll get to that later. In the meantime the visual below is to set into your R.A.S exactly where the awe must start. It must be generated when you answer the question ‘What do I really want? Who do I want to be? How do I want to feel when I get it?’ We’ll come back to the slide later

My first sense of awe was the first time… the only time… that my father took me to a football match. I still recall the smell of the grass as a thin mist swirled around and then my eyes almost watering at the smell of muscle liniment abundantly applied. My dad was tall but these men were like giants to me. The players were probably early twenties, but I had never seen men move like that with such power and pace (my father was a smoker and couch potato book reader as were all my relatives at the time and very much a trousers and cardigan type.) When I got home and my mum asked me if I had a good time I shouted out “They were real men, mum… real men!” So your homework here is to think back in time to the first time you felt awe. What was the occasion? How did it feel? Find that feeling and observe what sensations it triggers in your body

I wanted nothing more than to play football every moment of every day after that.

Remembering that first or early feeling of awe is essential. I want you to immerse in it. That is the feeling you need to have when you set your Intention soon. If you don’t feel the same, you have the wrong Intention.

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