Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center.

In this episode we unpack the power of awe – seeing the world fresh and new and how it can benefit our well being, our relationships, and help heal the rifts in our culture. Dacher tells heartfelt personal stories about his own life and the role of awe. We touch on the relationship of mindfulness and awe at work and leadership and in all parts of our lives.

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Dr. Keltner is one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists. He is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has over 200 scientific publications and six books, including Born to Be Good, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Power Paradox. He has written for many popular outlets, from The New York Times to Slate. He was also the scientific advisor behind Pixar’s Inside Out, is involved with the education of health care providers and judges, and has consulted extensively for Google, Apple, and Pinterest, on issues related to emotion and well-being.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones. This is Marc Lesser. Zen Bones is a biweekly podcast that features conversations with leading spiritual teachers and activists, and it’s an exploration of how Zen teachings and practices can inform and support your everyday life. Please support our work by making a donation at marclesser.net. M-A-R-C-L-E-S-S-E-R.net It would be most appreciated. Thank you.

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Dacher Keltner is an American Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who directs the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. He’s also the founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center. His new book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. In today’s episode, we unpack the power of awe, seeing the world fresh and new, and how it can benefit our well being, our relationships, and help heal the rifts in our culture. Dacher tells some heartfelt personal stories about his own life and the role of awe. We touch on the relationship of mindfulness and awe at work and in leadership and in all parts of our lives. I bring you Dacher Keltner.

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Dacher, it’s such a pleasure to see you.

[00:01:34] Dacher Keltner: It’s great to see you, Marc, and be in conversation with you again.

[00:01:38] Marc: I was recently asked to write an article for a major CEO magazine, and the topic that they wanted me to write on was how to work effectively with workplace conflicts. I started writing this article, and I said, “The secret sauce, really, to working with conflicts is mindfulness.” Then I proceeded to write about a little exercise of looking at your hand as though you had never seen your hand before.

[00:02:16] Dacher: That’s cool.

[00:02:17] Marc: I was trying to give them a little taste of awe. It made me wonder about ways, without drugs, to give people a taste of awe and also how any thoughts or research or stories you want to tell about conflict, awe, and its relationship to helping us more skillfully meet other people and work skillfully with conflict.

[00:02:48] Dacher: Well, you got to, I believe, the central mindset, if you will, or cognitive orientation to finding awe, Marc, just to see things like you’ve never seen them before. That’s obviously a very Buddhist idea that you’ve been teaching for a long time. We did a study where we asked people to go out on a walk and basically do their regular walk, what we now call an awe walk, with that orientation to what you’re walking through. It brought a lot of awe. It brought a lot of joy. It made these elderly participants in our study experience less pain.

This basic orientation of don’t go into the world with preconceptions, biases, but just imagine things as if you had never seen them, brings you awe to answer your question. Then the other thing for our audience to know we’ve done a lot of research, 26 different countries and you can find awe through this orientation in what I call the eight wonders of life in my book, Awe, which is the moral beauty of other people, collective movement, nature, music, visual design, spirituality, contemplation, and then ideas in life and death.

I think, Marc, if you can adopt that stance toward the world of, “Man, imagine you haven’t seen this before,” and then apply it to music or nature or somebody near you, you’re on your way to a lot of good awe. One of my favorite studies that I report on in this book is we find that brief experiences of awe lead people to polarize their political opponents less and polarize debates over police brutality or abortion less or gun rights. What that means is awe is this antidote, like you suggest, to polarizing conflict, which is one of our real social problems today.

[00:04:48] Marc: I think of it as again, this article that I was writing was about basically saying that even though I was using– Interestingly, I was using the word mindfulness. I think a big component of what we call mindfulness is awe, or is seeing the world fresh is stepping out of our usual patterns. I’ve been rereading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Every time I read it, I see it new. I’m amazed at– There’s a line in there where he says, “The world is its own magic.” In that talk, he says that we see the world in a certain way because everyone around us sees it that way, and that’s why it’s so hard. People don’t generally go around with a sense of awe.

[00:05:45] Dacher: I think that it’s a miracle of human cognition to develop shared understandings of the world. It’s essential to culture and collectives, but at the same time, those shared understandings become expectations and preconceptions and biases and prejudices and can lead us to miss the wonders of the world.

I think that one of the exciting things about awe, and I’ve written a bit about this, and I think people are really contemplating this in the contemplative world is that awe alongside mindfulness, what awe orients you to is all of the systems around you that constitute the world. Ecosystems, pollinating systems, tree systems, social systems, musical systems. Awe adds a layer to our contemplative life of putting you in relation to these systems that really are what I believe to be life. There’s a lot of magic and wonder there at that stance.

[00:06:43] Marc: I want to come back to what you were saying just a few moments ago about the power of doing an awe walk. Again, it’s like, “Why would we walk in any other way?”

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[00:06:59] Dacher: Thank you for that reminder.

[00:07:03] Marc: I think especially when we’re in the midst of our busy lives, it’s just an opportunity to make a giant shift. It’s interesting. I generally do that. I think of walking meditation, as they should just call it an awe walk.

[00:07:23] Dacher: [laughs] Yes. You have this mysterious emotion, an ineffable emotion, some people believe rarefied awe. Turns out people feel it a lot, two to three times a week. It’s actually an everyday emotion there to be cultivated as you were suggesting. Virginia Sturm and I, she’s a neuroscientist at UC San Francisco, we’re interested in, like, “How could we just get people to feel awe in the most basic of activities?”

We devised the Awe Walk, and it has your instructions, which is go somewhere new and imagine you hadn’t seen it before and you were a child, and what would you think about it? It produced awe, and it’s just this easy way to find awe, whether you’re in a city or in a beautiful rural area or walking through a garden like Charles Darwin used to do. I have to tell you, it’s interesting that simple activity is really powerful.

When my daughter Seraphina was about 10 or 9 or 8, and this is the origins of the Awe Walk, she first freaked out about the idea of infinity. She’s like, “Oh, my God, space is infinite.” Then she immediately got to like, “Oh, my God, we all die.” [laughs] She had this anxious response, like a lot of young people do to the big ideas. We took awe walks at night. Every night, we would have this ritual of walking up the street, looking at the homes, commenting, the foliage, and then we would touch this cedar tree and think about its life and it gave us awe. I think that’s what awe walks are there to do. Help us find meaning as you were saying.

[00:09:00] Marc: Yes. I’ve been spending more time in Missoula because I have a daughter here, and outside my home here is this amazing linden tree. I can’t help but feel awe seeing this tree. I walk out– The trees here are amazing. Just it’s like they’re different sense than Northern California tree. One of the assignments I often will do is not only see the world through fresh eyes, but see if you can find an object that you never realized was there, find an object and bring it back and we’ll put it on the altar and talk about this object.

I mean, the world is filled with objects as well.

[00:09:46] Dacher: It’s interesting, Marc, I love your example of the hand, too. I’ve had four or five epiphanies just looking at the hand like, “Oh, my God.” One of my favorites so powerful that has emerged in the conversations around awe, one of the things we find is people are really moved to awe by the moral beauty of fellow human beings. How we sacrifice, how we’re courageous, how we overcome poverty or racism.

One of the reliable sources of that, is this everyday contemplation of other people where you just look into a stranger’s eyes. I remember in London was giving a talk on awe and this guy said, you know, he started tearing up like, “Wow, I was on the tube here and I just looked over and made eye contact with this woman and we almost teared up. Wow, there is shared humanity here.” That’s just looking afresh at what is around us to find awe and really stuck with me.

[00:10:45] Marc: Also in the trainings that I used to do really regularly at Google and other places, we’d have to work up to it. It’s funny, I remember in the beginning we tried having people look into each other’s eyes too early on, and they would go running out of the room because it would flop. By the second day we could then get people to create a little bit more safety and l ooking into another person’s eye, we did it with a just me kind of meditation. It was meant to be experiencing empathy but really what really did it was an experience of awe, even though we weren’t using– there was I think an unintended consequence of looking in another person’s eye and doing a just like me guided meditation was this feeling of awe.

[00:11:40] Dacher: Yes. One of the really interesting new discoveries in the science that I write about in Awe is this inner subjective sense of collective self that develops early in a child’s growth. I think it begins with eye contact, mutual gaze, and then the synchronization of physiology, the activation of vagal tone, and suddenly through mutual eye contact done right, as you suggest, you’re in this shared mental state which is a pathway to awe. It’s profound that we can find it so easily on a London tube to go to a talk.

[00:12:18] Marc: Interesting too the connection between awe and the word sacred. Seeing the world as sacred. Again, how this has a role in being more effective with conflict or as you were saying, not getting so caught in our divisive, the divisiveness in our country and politics. If we could just find a way to give everyone a taste of the sacred, a taste of the awe. Man, you got work to do.

[00:12:51] Dacher: I’m going to give psychedelics to the congress and get them to feel collective or no. I’m excited. This work on awe has really opened up just as you were suggesting that a rereading of Zen Buddhism– I just had some anesthesiologists reach out to me like, “Wow, surgery and anesthesiology is all awe. It’s this radical alteration of a mental state. You come out of it, and how to guide people to appreciate that.” There’s a lot of good work with awe right now in trying to get communities to recognize what’s sacred and to revere it, so I think it’s a useful idea.

[00:13:28] Marc: Well, you mentioned psychedelics but I don’t really want to go there because where I really want-

[00:13:32] Dacher: Neither do I.

[00:13:33] Marc: Where I really want to go is without drugs, and this is the simple things about awe walk, seeing your hand. It’s interesting what you mentioned about your daughter, and the connection of awe and this larger question of how we swim and live in birth and life and death. It’s interesting this is where in this talk on the world is its own magic, that Shunryu Suzuki does.

It’s all kind of a setup toward getting us to experience that. He makes this statement actually that we’re always here. We’ve been here before we’re born, and we’ll be here after we die. That it’s a delusion to think that we appear and can disappear. He goes on to say that if we can embody that reality, we will live without fear. Which I think is a beautiful aspiration for how to actually live in the world.

[00:14:37] Dacher: Yes, thanks for bringing that up, Marc. I wrote this book, and you’re friends with my dad, and we lost my brother Rolf. He and I had this magical wonderful childhood raised in kind of a counterculture type family, and he was in some sense my moral compass. He provided me a bearing in life, and when he passed away, when watching him die, I felt a lot of awe at the mystery of it all and it caught me off guard.

Then I fell into a state of awelessness where I just was lost without him. Went in search of awe and the ways that we’re talking about real contemplation, observation, reflection, soul searching. It led me to what you’re saying, which is I’m a scientist, a biological reductionist, but I felt him in me, I sensed him around me. His being continues, it goes onward and outward as Walt Whitman says, and led me to a different view, much aligned with what you’re saying which is that life always continues. It’s just this cycle that we’re part of.

I have to say, Marc, I’ve been in some ways genetically an anxious person, and in that process I don’t feel fear about a lot of things that I used to feel fear about. I really grasped with my very narrow linear western scientific mind the idea of cycles and it changed me, so I’m glad you’re bringing it up.

[00:16:10] Marc: No, thank you for sharing that and your own vulnerability talking about your brother and your feelings about that. It’s so interesting that you talk about yourself as the scientific mind, and writing a book about awe. It’s like I’m trying to put these things together.

[00:16:29] Dacher: So am I. [laughs] It’s just what has been forced upon me. That was what was really– and it’s interesting and thanks for bringing that up. I had all this great science on awe, and it’s just a fertile time for the scientific study of awe. We’re learning a lot about the nervous system and it’s place in human evolution. I think the core of the book is stories like we’re telling here.

That first person stories, first person experiences were– as William James understood when he wrote about the ecstasy of religion, and is cultivated in a lot of Buddhist thinking. Those first person stories really get to what awe is, and so I had to gather a lot of those too alongside the science to understand this amazing emotion.

[00:17:18] Marc: I’m also thinking about– I was watching a new series on Netflix yesterday, and I was just in awe of how creative we human beings are.

[00:17:31] Dacher: Oh my God.

[00:17:31] Marc: Putting together– just amazing, the creativity. I’ll share with you. One of the shows I was watching that– I had to watch it by myself because it’s too dark for my wife to watch it, but the show is called Barry. Which-

[00:17:48] Dacher: I’ve heard about it. I haven’t seen it.

[00:17:50] Marc: It’s about a hitman who stumbles into an acting class, and really wants to get out of being a hitman and wants to be an actor, and the characters you realize of course– so stepping back, they’re all just acting. There’s all these layers and the hit men are over the top characterized characters. I was almost in tears watching just how amazingly– who wrote this? Who thought of this? We human beings and so much that’s on is just awe inspiring if we are– but we have to I think– it’s like seeding awe in our own being so that we can see everything through that lens.

[00:18:44] Dacher: Awe is a lens upon reality, and it’s a way that we can construct our lives. When I was in grief having lost my brother, I had the realization that you just described, Marc. We live in many ways in the best of times for awe. We can find it in art from around the world, music from around the world, incredible dramas that are the reflection of human creativity, scientific discoveries of the cell and gene editing that are mind blowing.

I had to put that lens on my eyes, that I’ve got to go listen to music that brings me meaning and awe. I’ve got to watch shows. I watch Game of Thrones again, just like whoa, whoa, whoa just the spectacle of it all. I think that’s in some sense a contemplative choice we have, that the science tells us is really good for us. I agree with you, there’s so much to marvel at right now.

[00:19:43] Marc: Yes. Well, is there anything else that you would like to bring into this time right now? Anything you want to do, or offer, or say about this practice, or this being, or any story you want to tell?

[00:19:56] Dacher: I guess it’s so fascinating, Marc, because my dad gave me Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind when I was in high school, I think, and it blew me away. I read it several times. I’ve been very influenced by Buddhism, thankfully. It was interesting to do the science of awe over my career and write this book. Some of its core ideas align with what you’ve been teaching. It’s everywhere. Awe is everywhere. It’s the world. It is about pausing and reflecting and looking at things anew, as you said.

All I’ll add is the science tells us is it’s so good for our minds and bodies. It reduces inflammation. It’s good for your heart. Helps us handle conflicts, which we started with. It makes us feel less stressed, makes us feel like we have more time. I just feel, in this work, this is good news for our hard times. It makes you more environmentally friendly. Eat less red meat when you feel awe. It’s a good emotion to be talking about and I’m grateful you’ve brought it into the community.

[00:21:04] Marc: I’m grateful for the science. It’s one of the things that somehow, I guess it was now, I don’t know, 15 years ago I found myself standing up in front of rooms of Google engineers, co-teaching with scientists. I became in awe of science.

[00:21:20] Dacher: I love science. 

[00:21:21] Marc: Interesting the realm of science and the realm of what’s in our experience and where those things are vastly different and where they overlap. Man, so awe, I think. That’s why I so love the work that you do, which is that the rigor of the science and yet you bring in this childlike quality of not knowing even what the science will show you.

[00:21:48] Dacher: Thank you. It’s funny in the end, the word that kept returning to me in writing awe is mystery. Awe is an emotion that is animated by mystery. I don’t understand this. Then the idea is that it takes you to unfold into other mysteries. I was really grateful for that because I’ve often shied away from mystery and awe opened me up to how wonderful that is.

[00:22:18] Marc: Well, thank you, Dacher. Thank you for just who you are and your good work.

[00:22:22] Dacher: Oh.

[00:22:23] Marc: May your good health continue.

[00:22:26] Dacher: To you too, Marc. It’s always good to be with you. Thank You.

[00:22:28] Marc: Take care.

[00:22:29] Dacher: Bye-bye.

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[00:22:35] Marc: I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work and my new book, Finding Clarity, you can visit my website, marclesser.net, M-A-R-C-L-E-S-S-E-R.net. This podcast is offered freely, and at the same time, it relies on the financial support from listeners like you. Thank you very much.

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