Cultivating Awe at School—Yes, Really!

It turns out that the kind of collective focus that makes learning engaging and inspiring can also enhance our collective wellbeing as humans and in the Earth community writ large.

Whether as a teacher or a student, when was the last time you felt truly excited and engaged at school?

I certainly do recall moments in my discussion-based college classes when everyone gets focused and excited on whatever we’re talking about (yesterday it was “Hamlet”) and there is a kind of magical collective energetic field that materializes between us. Our minds are in synch, and there is a kind of euphoria to that feeling.

And then my gaze will fall on the student whose eyes remain stubbornly focused downward, looking at their phone beneath the table, totally alienated from the rest of the group’s collective energy. Or on the student who can’t seem to stop checking and responding to the I-watch on their wrist every 30 seconds.

Let’s face it, it is getting harder and harder to achieve the kind of collective focus that makes learning a fun, inspiring collaborative practice.

It turns out that this is not only negatively impacting students’ ability to learn, but also our collective wellbeing as humans and in the Earth community writ large.

In a recent podcast conversation, Krista Tippett talked with psychologist Dacher Keltner about his research into how humans’ energy fields are brought into alignment by collective activities, from music and dance to chanting, sports and yes, sometimes, educational experiences.

Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab and the Greater Good Science Center, is author of the book Awe: The New Science of an Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. The book is in the self-help vein, but Keltner does have a wider ecological view of “self,” understanding how connection—to nature, to other living beings—is key to human happiness.

Keltner agrees with Thomas Berry that we are going through a “crisis of meaning” these days. As the old religious and political raisons d’etre lose their potency, science has risen as a guiding ideology—but now, in the 21^st century, it’s clear that science has failed to foresee the longterm impacts of all the technological “progress” it has underwritten, to the point where it is quite unclear a) whether science can save us from the wrecked climate system it has caused; and b) whether the kind of geoengineered world envisioned by many top scientists is a world that would make us happy and give us a shared sense of meaning.

Thomas Berry, writing in the 1990s, was quite clear that neither religion nor science could be the guiding “story” for the 21^st century, at least not without significant reinvention. His answer to the crisis of meaning is to remind people that we are an integral part of the endless unfolding of the universe.

We who are alive today have a special calling to rediscover our nearly lost ability to feel our profound connection with everything else in the universe. Out of this awe-inspiring communion, Berry says, will come the empathy and creativity needed to successfully navigate these troubled times and develop a mutually beneficial human-Earth relationship.

Like Berry, Keltner points to how older spiritual traditions from many cultures have made it a central practice to lead humans to open their minds to what he calls the “collective effervescence” of awe.

Through extensive scientific research Keltner confirms Berry’s intuition that when we feel awe, we feel an expansion of self that enhances our connection to other people and to the entire world around us—and this not only makes us feel good as individuals, it makes us more likely to do good for those around us.

It’s getting harder and harder to achieve this “expansion of self,” however. Since the advent of smartphones, “we’ve been in this big narrowing of consciousness,” Keltner says. “The young people I teach are very good at algorithms and computations,” but “they need the broader view. Awe tells us: go out and expand your view of things.”

For Thomas Berry, the expansion called for is huge. “What is needed is the completion of the story of the physical dimensions of the universe by an account of the numinous and psychic dimensions of the universe,” he says in his essay “The American College in the Ecological Age.”

“We need to bring science and the humanities together,” he goes on. “The humanists need to appreciate “the imaginative power, the intellectual insight and the spiritual quality of the scientific vision. The fruitful interaction between the scientific and the religious humanist vision is our greatest promise for the future as well as the great task of the educator.”

To achieve this “fruitful interaction,” Berry defines three core values—differentiation, subjectivity and communion—that are, as he puts it, both “physical and psychic” in nature.

My loose paraphrase of his ideas about these core values would be:

·      Everything in the universe is different, and that’s a glorious thing

·      Everything in the universe has consciousness, even though it may be different than human consciousness

·      Everything in the universe is integral to everything else—there is no separation.

To live these values would be to celebrate diversity; respect all the different ways that consciousness takes form; and recognize that our individual flourishing is dependent on the flourishing of the collective.

We have come a long way in terms of respecting human diversity, but we do not yet respect or even recognize that all the different forms around us, both living and nonliving, are worthy of respect. This is because we are still very far from living the second two values.

Berry saw that if we could recognize the sacred intelligence of the Earth community (and the entire universe), and realize that we are always integral to everything else, this profound communion could release us from our self-imposed prison of alienation from the “numinous” world around us, solving the crisis of meaning and helping us to participate fully and joyfully in the universe, which is, “by definition, a single gorgeous celebratory event.”

Now, back to our classroom…where very rarely do we get those kind of collective “highs” when everyone is focused, inspired and joyful.

I want to propose that this is, precisely, the task of the teacher—or more generally, of all adults in any community: to help open spaces for young people to cultivate their sense of communion with each other and the world around them, and experience the sweet delights that life has to offer.

In the age of the smartphone, this is a tough task—and yet even as I write that, I can hear the young people chorusing back at me, what, are you kidding? We are always hyper-connected, through our phones!

It’s true that in our networked world, direct experience has expanded in some ways—I can talk with people all across the globe, instantly! But it has lost a lot of its diversity and depth in other ways.

Looking at a beautiful sunset on a screen is just not the same as taking it in while standing on a beach, let’s face it! It’s kind of like how pornography can never be a replacement for actual physical intimacy with someone you love.

I worry that those of us who spend the bulk of our time on screens may be losing the capacity for direct communion.

We have to work at it.

Keltner recommends “awe walks,” which sounds comical, but he means it quite seriously, as in—go outside and deliberately look for those experiences that fill you with awe.

You can recognize the activation of awe in your body, he says, by a sense of tingling or goosebumps, or by the kind of euphoria that takes hold of us when we see something beautiful in nature, or when we participate in big synchronized events like concerts, dances and games.

In the educational context, the cultivation of awe, or communion in Berry’s terms, should not be considered a trivial pursuit, a take-it-or-leave-it “extracurricular.”

If we want to figure out our way through the social and environmental crises of our time, we need to rediscover in ourselves the capacity to feel deeply with others, including more-than-human others.

Through the activation of what Keltner calls the “vagus nerve,” (similar to what Buddhist traditions call the “heart center”) we can, as Berry said, begin to understand how education can be part of “creating a future worthy of that larger universal community of beings out of which the human component emerged and in which the human community finds its proper fulfillment.”

I will close for now with a stirring quote from Berry’s introduction to The Dream of the Earth, in which he lays out his vision of “an intimate Earth community, a community of all the geological, biological and human components. Only in recent times has such a vision become possible. We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the Earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the Earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.

“The time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the earth, to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends.

“Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger Earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being. Our human destiny is integral with the destiny of the Earth.”

Amen, Brother Thomas.

Fogbows are always awe-inspiring to me. Photo by J. Browdy.