What is awe and where can you get more of it?

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Originally published at: What is awe and where can you get more of it? | Boing Boing

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Drugs?

… or so I’ve heard

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and where can you get more of it?

By watching School House Rock, maybe?

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At the disco?

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Y’all need SWOLE DINOSAUR RIDIN’ JESUS

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I’ll be over here, studying “Awwwwwwwwww!” instead.

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I feel something like awe sometimes, when I try to imagine where everything came from. How it all started in the first place. How could everything come from…nothing? Or, how could there always have been something?

It was awe-inspiring questions like that that partly made me give up on Christianity. It just didn’t make any sense to me that I was supposed to believe that “God” created everything, and not ask who created “Him.”

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Not a suggestion! Just this movie really stuck with me

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Interjections! Show emotion! Or excitement!

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“They’re generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point. Or by a comma, when the feeling’s not as strong.”

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Ask John Wayne.

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Off topic, but the post image caused me a double take. As far as I’ve yet found, the eyeball closeup that me and my partner did a few years ago is the biggest and clearest floating around on the web. Thought I’d found a contender for a moment.

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ETA: I should probably revisit this shot; I’m much better at working with RAW files than I was when we did this way back when, and some of y’all have probably noticed my sloppy touchup in the pupil.

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Here is where emotions come into play. You might react to our improbability with joy, because you realize how lucky we are to be alive. We shouldn’t be here, and yet here we are. It’s a miracle! Or you might brood over how how perilous our existence is, because you realize that non-existence is infinitely more probable than existence. But the improbability that triggers these emotions isn’t just in your head, it is out there. And so is the weirdness.

The problem is, many people don’t think the universe, life and consciousness are especially weird. When I talk to my students about the weirdness of existence, they often look baffled. They think I’m weird for insisting that existence is weird.

(I’ve always wondered if there is a conditional switch for whether someone has this intuitive sense of weirdness or otherwise, is it merely some chemical disposition - or is there a subtle yet fundamental variation in the set of base assumptions about existence, maybe we all have it in one sense or another and just call it by different names)

"When I was born I was so surprised I didn’t talk for a year and a half.”

― Gracie Allen

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Awe is where you find it. It is not in the nature of the thing you look at but in the mind that does the looking. Things are not boring, you look at them in a boring way.

“Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they invented boredom.” (Death) - T. Pratchett (I know, can’t do small caps here)

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YES YOU CAN, SILLY HUMAN.

Y<small>ES</small> Y<small>OU</small> C<small>AN</small>, S<small>ILLY</small> H<small>UMAN.</small>

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