الموضوع: هل تولد الحياة من رحم الموت؟؟؟ دراسة بحثية
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قديم 08-27-2013, 12:38 PM
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August 23, 2011

The Great Awe-Wakening

How often do we hear young people today exclaim “that’s awesome!” or “I’m in awe?” Or in another context, how often do we continue (!) to hear military authorities characterize their bombing operations in the epic terms of “shock and awe?” A bit too often, I’m afraid. Yet, the fact that “awe” — and its variants — are flooding our vocabulary is not an altogether menacing sign. Indeed it is perhaps a welcoming sign that beyond its casual usage, the fuller and deeper sensibility of “awe” is reemerging in our culture.
The sensibility of awe has undergone many incarnations in humanity’s history. In ancient times, for example, awe was viewed quite narrowly as the sense of being daunted or overcome, particularly by nature. The experience of being daunted, as Rudolf Otto put it in his classic study of religion The Idea of the Holy, was the primal experience of creation, and the primal experience of creation, he went on, was the seedbed for religion. On the other hand, in more recent years, the sensibility of awe has either been neglected, as was the case during the industrial revolution and rise of science, or in our contemporary age, embraced mainly for its exalting qualities, such as its capacity to thrill.
The truth, however, is that awe is neither a paralyzing jolt nor a “feel good” boost but a profound and complex attitude. This attitude, for those fortunate enough to harbor it, embraces both apprehension and thrill, humility and the grandeur of creation. Hence when young people proclaim “awwwesome,” they often appear to glimpse but not necessarily embrace essential awe.
My awe-wakening began fifty-two years ago, when I was two and a half. After a long battle with chicken pox, compounded by pneumonia, my brother of seven collapsed on a hospital cot. With the collapse of my brother came the collapse of my world. Nothing remained the same — not my innocence, nor my routines, nor my parents. The death was like a rent in the fabric of my early childhood security blanket. Into this tear rushed every demon imaginable — witches, Frankenstein monsters, and faceless killers. I especially feared the night, because this was the time when the void opened wide, and the most the sinister figure imaginable rushed in — the unknown.
So there I was, three years old and at the edge of a precipice. I was sinking but little did I realize then that I was also at the edge of a very exceptional awakening, a wonder, that primarily the wounded are blessed (or cursed!) to glimpse. Yet I felt nothing close to being blessed at that time. I felt horror, and tried desperately to block it out — or scream it away.
Over time, and with the help of some profoundly healing encounters, I realized that the answer lay not in my evasions, but in my questions; not in my withdrawals but in my discoveries. In this way, change and the unknown progressively became portals for me — openings for awareness. Among these openings was a jarring yet deepened sense of the temporariness of life, and the value of the moment in its wake; another was the discovery of my aloneness and the playful wonder that could arise from it; and another, finally, was the abrupt realization of life’s uncertainties, which could be intriguing as much—if not more than—stultifying. This latter sensibility was especially acute in my fascination for science fiction. I would spend many absorbing hours either creating or watching stories about distant lands, hidden worlds, or peculiar states of mind. I would be unnerved by these scenarios but also and equally enthralled. Books like A Wrinkle in Time and The Fall of the House of Usher, movies like The Wizard of OZ and Frankenstein, and TV shows like The Outer Limits and One Step Beyond became my intimate companions. I could lie on my bedroom floor for perhaps hours, after a dramatic show, or even an intense sob, and make up characters, plays, and ideas for movies. I even made up a play movie studio, complete with “contract players,” scripts, drawings, and toy sets. As I got older, these forays morphed into short-story writing, poetry, and an impassioned interest in philosophy and psychology. In sum, I became fascinated by existence and the grand questions of existence: who are we, what are we, and what is being all about? I was not so much directed to these questions as supported to discover them, wrestle with their implications, and follow out their leads. This was not an easy road, to be sure—or a linear one—but, ultimately, for me, it was a rewarding one. This was my road to awe.
The Nature and Power of Awe

In the many years between my early trauma and today, this is what I discovered about awe:
It is ever there, awaiting.
It is not about God but beyond God—an ever-flowing fount.
The awesomeness of life, of being, is inexhaustible. No matter what we lose, fear, or despise, it is there. It is there at our darkest hour, in trial as in devastation, in life as in death; because it is beyond life and death, trial and devastation.
It’s not that it is readily accessible, perceivable, or even conceivable; at our worst times, it is opaque.
However, it is available and that availability can be realized in an instant or a lifetime.
Awe, finally, is our humility and wonder before creation, and our astonishment before creation. It is neither the bliss-filled light nor the despair-riddled dark—but the MORE—whether bliss-filled or desperate.
Awe-wakening in the Everyday

In the spring of 2005, I conducted an investigation of the impact of awe on seven seasoned adults. I asked these participants how and in what ways awe had affected their lives. This sample consisted of Jim Hernandez, an ex-gang leader turned gang mediator and youth advocate; Michael Cooper, an ex-drug addict who became a yoga instructor and case worker; Candice Hershman, a psychotherapist who suffered from an emotionally abusive childhood; Fraser Pierson, a professor of psychology who grew up with a schizophrenic parent; E. Mark Stern, also a professor, who labored with stage three cancer; Charles Gompertz, an Episcopal priest who worked with troubled youth; and Jeff Schneider, a humorist who suffered from a banal suburban past.
Although each of the people in my sample struggled mightily with very trying life circumstances, they also as a whole refused the quick fixes that are so rampant today, whether those fixes pertained to consumer goods, drugs, or simplistic beliefs. In different ways at different periods, they each found their way to awe.
In the passages to follow, I will relay my findings from this investigation, in the hope that others who struggle with similar circumstances may find value in them. The first finding is that each of the people interviewed found some inspiration, whether that be a person, a ritual, a form of nature, or a work of art, that sparked them on their awe-based path.
The ex-gang leader Jim Hernandez, for example, began his road toward awe as an altar boy in his parents’ Catholic church. Although he felt oppressed by many of the demands of this position, he also found solace in it. This solace focused on a bigger picture of life that opened up for him as an altar boy, such as the solemnity of his assistance to the priest, and the mystery evoked by the ceremonies. These experiences gave him a glimpse of an alternate universe—a sharply drawn contrast with his life on the street and the melancholy he experienced as a child.
The ex-addict, Michael Cooper, began to connect with the awesomeness of life through his encounter with the deaths of his mother and brother, and later through spiritual practices. These experiences alerted him to the idea there was so much more to life than his obsessive focus on appearances (he was a highly gifted gymnast at the time) and the drugs to keep them up.