When was the last time you tasted the sublime?
When did you last feel wonder?
Can you remember feeling awed by something?
These are things we need, if we are to thrive. They are fuel for the higher human abilities. If we lack them, as is currently endemic throughout the West, our higher abilities will lag.
For lack of better terms we can call these feelings “upward movements of the heart,” and we are diminished when there is a lack of them. Without them we fail to develop our higher capacities and insights. We slide more and more toward becoming, in one critic’s words, “mere trousered apes.”
I am certainly not the first person to notice this. Here, for example, is something Albert Einstein wrote on the subject:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Here’s a comment from Mozart:
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
And here’s a poem from Richard Feynman:
Out of the cradle
onto the dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.
We need these things.
Currents to the Contrary
Sadly, the modern West has become a mad scramble to distract as many sets of eyes as possible, and to keep them – to own them – for as long as possible. And so long as professional distractors own your imagination, you won’t experience much in the way of awe.
Think of Google and Facebook; these outfits bring in billions of dollars per month, based almost entirely on how much human attention they can capture. Likewise the many news networks; they get paid according to how many people watch their images for how many minutes. These people are serious about owning your brain cycles; they employ armies of employees to count, gather, plan, and improve their ownership of your eyes.
Please understand the content they deliver serves only to grasp your attention.
Certainly websites like Freeman’s Perspective also want your attention but not for its own sake. I want your attention because I think we have something worthwhile to communicate, not to own your brain. Facebook and Google want to own you… the inner you.
Likewise the lords of academia((I am not including kind, benevolent teachers in this group… some of whom still survive in modern academia.)); they want your mind to bear their impress… permanently.
Consider, for example, the many academics who espouse cold, rationalist, materialistic philosophies: that we are no more than preprogrammed machines, that words can never really communicate anything, that humanity is ignorant and dangerous.
Have you noticed that they reek of “smarter than thou”?
Then if you have the opportunity, examine their lives for beautiful acts, for loving passions, for kindness and deep benevolence. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll notice a striking lack of those things.
The Contrasts
Among the greatest of all contrasts to the upward movements of the heart are those pertaining to dominance, status, and rulership. They are natural antagonists.
Think of drinking in the wonders of the universe, the beauty of nature, the glorious love between a good parent and their child… and then contrast those things with the blight of the dominator “protecting” you at the point of a sword… of the politician cultivating your fears like a gardener cultivates a garden… of the lover of status who feels pleasure when seeing you beneath her.
Dominance, status, and rulership are the drives of the people who abuse us. And they are primary causes for our elevated experiences being diminished.
Moving Past the Blockage
We need to get away from these people and beyond these foul concepts. And once we do, life will expand. Here to make that point is a final quote, this one from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:
The loss of awe is the avoidance of insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom…
The things that contribute to our higher nature have been driven away from the Western world, and often systematically. Humans who are denuded of the higher things are far less trouble to rule, and they are far easier to manipulate… to own without their noticing.
But don’t let yourself by driven away from the higher and better things:
Lay under the stars and wonder.
Look into the face of a child and experience his or her awe of the world.
Sit in the wilderness and imagine benevolence and beauty and goodness unchained.
Lie in bed and imagine yourself with a conscious sense of righteousness.
Imagine yourself with no embedded fear.
Ruminate over good things you could do in the future, over beautiful things you’d do in the right circumstances.
Politics poisons this, dominators wish to subdue it, sociopaths cannot experience it.
Get as much of it as you can. Go out of your way to cultivate it.
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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
Although I am an aging carpenter and have a cynical streak a mile long, I spend my weekends (whenever possible), camera equipment in hand, seeking the sublime. I often find it in landscapes and nature. Fleeting moments of wonder come during my photography missions along the remote islands and marshlands of the Georgia coast. When I return to the human world it is hard to relive those moments while dealing with never ending distractions of driving, working, and trying to keep my head above water. Thanks for this essay, Paul, I couldn’t agree with you more. Peace.
That’s wonderful, Y.T, and my pleasure.
In flyover country too many are just waiting for Trump to reopen the coal mines. Good luck with that. Some young kid will see the hopelessness of it all and the futility of Trump’s promises, set aside the hillbilly heroin, say goodbye to mom and dad (or maybe even vanish without a word if the folks just don’t understand) and going to go for a long long walk never to return, to find the dock of the bay. Then he will wake up one morning feeling much much better, and with something to do. And the world will come to know who he is.
Awe is proof that one has humility. My fight with cancer has given me plenty of both but most of all the latter. Sure, I have loved looking at stars my whole life and currently live under one of the darkest night skies on the west coast of North America. The heavens are readily visible on clear nights. I live in the rain forest and love it. My children and their children keep me young at heart and I see the future in their eyes. I spend much of my life in bed and as I face death often, no longer fear it. Due to that there is little else I fear. I do see a lovely future though as I am newly single, with many friends. OK, I may not likely have more than three or four decades left but that is half a good life and if I live it doing new things in new ways, for what more could I ask? This essay could well have been written for and about me if one added art and music as lynchpins of a wonderful life. Thanks Paul for a reminder of the important things in life.