Awe

Awe is the emotion that arises in response to encounters with something vast — physically, conceptually, or spiritually — that exceeds the ordinary frames one uses to understand the world. The contemporary psychological research literature, particularly the work of Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt (Approaching awe, 2003), analyses awe into two consistent components: perceived vastness (the object exceeds the ordinary scale of the observer's experience) and a need for accommodation (the observer must adjust their mental models to make sense of it). When both components are present, awe reliably follows.

Awe is elicited across a wide range of triggers: the natural world (mountain ranges, night skies, oceans, storms); great works of art or music; moral goodness of extraordinary scale (encounters with heroic action); scientific insights that reorganise one's understanding; and — most powerfully — direct religious, mystical, or psychedelic experience of the divine or of the fundamental structure of reality. The astronaut and cosmonaut literature has extensively documented the overview effect — the specific awe elicited by viewing the Earth from orbit — as one of the most durably transformative experiences available.

Empirical research has documented consistent physical and behavioural correlates of awe. The state produces the somatic 'chills' response, tears, gooseflesh; behaviourally, it consistently reduces measured self-focus, increases prosocial behaviour, increases perception of available time, and reduces materialistic acquisitiveness. Contemporary well-being research treats awe as a distinct positive emotion with unusually potent long-term benefits — awe experiences are among the very few emotional events that reliably change core life-orientation in follow-up studies.

In psychedelic and mystical experience awe is a near-universal feature of high-dose sessions. Participants describe passing through moments of awe so intense that the ordinary language of positive emotion — happy, pleased, satisfied — becomes irrelevant; something wider and less personal is happening. The Griffiths et al. mystical-experience questionnaire measures related dimensions (positive mood, ineffability, sacredness) that all cluster with awe in the empirical literature. The Buddhist saṃvega (spiritual urgency arising from confrontation with the truth of things) and the Christian timor Domini (holy fear) point at closely related phenomenological states.

Sources:
Wikipedia — Awe
Wikipedia — Overview effect