Awe - The Second Portal
Awe is a universal human experience, and a great contributor to fundamental well-being. It is one of our Six Portals.
Here is a an experience which consistently wins our contests for web content intended to evoke wonder. It's called arkadia.xyz and it’s an infinite regressive virtual tunnel voyage. It's powerful when experienced alone; it's more impactful in a group like a zoom call.
Because none of us encounter this in real life, it evinces a sense of Wonder. One of our members likes to say that as you watch this your right brain enjoys the journey, while your left brain says ‘wait a minute, it’s not possible for someone to progress infinitely through this landscape.” As both halves of your brain compare notes and argue with each other about this, what happens is that you begin to address the problem of habituation. Habituation is a term psychologists use to explain how you can have a consistently present experience once which has a huge effect on you, but as time goes by you notice it less and less. Perhaps you buy an amazing painting and hang it on your wall, but after a few weeks you hardly notice it. People who try to inculcate Awe and Gratitude have this problem. They can tell you to go to the Grand Canyon, or the Taj Mahal, or the Great Pyramids to experience Awe, and you will, but the feeling doesn’t last. At AHA we specialize in not only evoking the growthful core experiences, but in making them last.
Here is a livestream we use to elicit Wonder:
https://explore.org/livecams/under-the-water/seajelly-cam
These are west coast sea nettles. This is a livestream which is available 24/7, showing these jellyfish swimming around. They have no heart and no brain, and yet they do things which seem to mimic agency. For example they move from the darker waters below to the upper sunlit water when they want to escape predators. So they’re an excellent background for a discussion on consciousness, and whether it precedes the brain, or whether consciousness emerged after the development of brains.
Here is another face of awe: a historic encounter that happened in the 80’s An explorer from Belgium named Jean-Pierre was lucky enough to have his cameras on when he encountered the Toulambi tribe of Papua New Guinea for the first time. These people had never seen an outsider before, and we can witness the the wonder and fear in this tribal member’s face as he meets Jean-Pierre. As you can see, he vacillates between wanting to shake hands and wanting to run away, or perhaps attack Jean-Pierre (at 7:50).
Primitive Forest Tribe Meets Modern Man for the First Time (FULL)
Invoking awe in this way is something like what you experienced when you were a kid and went to summer camp. Perhaps you sat around the bonfire with your fellow campers and looked at the stars. And you were filled with mystery and wonder at the sight of the Milky Way and the dark, mysterious forest. Technology allows us to re-create this campfire experience repeatedly.
Like gratitude and laughter, awe is one of the Six Portals that is contagious. In Zoom groups we find that people can infect others with the spirit of it. It feels as if the psyche WANTS to experience these things; it just needs permission to let itself go and feel the magic.
