Awe: A Superhighway to the Spiritual Core

I have always been fascinated by things that go “boom,” and lightning, of course, is one of those – just the primal power and unpredictability of it. And it’s also beautiful from a distance. Well, one summer in my early 20s, I was leading a wilderness hike for teenagers in the Lewis Fork Wilderness of Western Virginia. And we were camped in a spot that we called, informally, “Dead Pony Ridge” because there was a skeleton of a wild pony nearby. 

I was collecting firewood near our campsite, and there was no rain, no distant thunder, just kind of a cool breeze that suggested we should probably collect firewood soon, because it might rain. And BAM! – lightning struck a tree less than 100 ft away. The flash and the bang of it were simultaneously and gobsmackingly bright and loud. My ears rang, my eyes clenched, and I was momentarily deaf, blind and stunned. 

And then came the exhilaration. The whoops and the hollers, and the “Did you feel that?” Everybody was filled with an overwhelming feeling of triumph, excitement, and some feeling – one that’s hard to describe. 

Well, what I felt that day was awe. Awe is an emotion, an experience, a feeling. And until recently, researchers who study emotions and feelings hadn’t known much about awe. And I don’t know if it’s because they ran out of other emotions to study, or if no one thought to study awe before this – but really, just the last 25 years have seen a flurry of experimental studies of awe. And the results are predictably awesome. (Laughter) Researchers define awe – here it comes – as, quote, “An emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that overwhelm current mental structures, yet facilitate attempts at accommodation.” How’s that?

Well, in other words, awe takes us outside our everyday lives and challenges our conceptions of reality. It leaves us in a state of wonder as we try to make sense of it, try to make sense of what happened. 

Awe happens when we perceive something vast. And vastness can be physical, like the Grand Canyon or distant galaxies, or it can be the overwhelming light and sound of a lightning strike. Vastness can be metaphorical or conceptual, as in an expansive idea with vast implications, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example.

There’s another kind of vastness that we might not normally think of as vast. This woman has cancer, and to prepare for chemotherapy, she asked a barber to shave her head. And she’s obviously pretty distraught. And to her credit, he really gets the gravity of what he’s been asked to do for her. Watch what he does.

That is not the reason my head looks like that. (Laughter)

So, vastness can be social, like seeing someone perform an act of great kindness, with vast implications for how we think about our fellow humans. Vastness can also be embodied in the complexity of something, like this schematic of human metabolism. Awe can be invoked by grand vistas, powerful music, intense meditation, fast- or slow-motion videos, powerful people, intricate artwork – just kidding. Here’s some. It can be invoked by religious epiphanies, even impressive buildings, although studies show that nature and natural settings are by far the most common sources of awe for people.

The neuroscience of awe

And when we feel awe, several things happen inside us. We feel small and insignificant, suddenly aware that we are in the presence of something far greater than ourselves. And researchers call that experience the “small self.” And it’s related to the perceived vastness of the event that we’re witnessing.

At the same time, two different parts of our brain change their activity – the parietal lobe and the central executive network. (And relax – those terms will not be on the quiz. Just listen.)

The parietal lobe normally orients us and anchors us in our skins. It’s aware of our body’s edges and boundaries. During awe, the parietal lobe tamps down, dissolving the perceived boundaries between ourselves and our surroundings. So that makes us feel more connected – more a part of our environment.

And in extreme awe, many people reported an all-encompassing oneness with the entire universe. Sound familiar? I did hear this morning’s presentation. At the same time, the central executive network increases its activity, and this brain system is involved in what we pay attention to. So awe centers us in the moment, immersing us in the experience we’re having. In other words, the ego takes a little bit of a break. We can’t be self-conscious while we’re experiencing awe. Does any of that sound like the spiritual core to you?

Well, David Yaden at Johns Hopkins described six core characteristics of awe experiences. And we’ve discussed the first three already, but to illustrate this one, I want to show you a short video of the turning earth. And for now, just watch.

Now, pay attention to what’s happening in your body as we watch again. When we are in awe, our jaw drops and our mouth gapes. Eyebrows raise. Our eyes widen. Our heart rate changes. Our respiration changes. We may feel goosebumps or chills. And interestingly, any inflammation happening in the body decreases. So awe is the original anti-inflammatory medicine. (Laughter) Our nervous system shifts from “fight or flight” towards “rest and digest.” We feel happier, and our lives feel more meaningful.

But because our ego, our self-consciousness, is kind of offline, we usually can’t articulate those things in the moment. We just feel amazed. 

And related to this is the strange effect on our sense of time. During and after an awe experience, we are less impatient. We’re more likely to feel that there’s enough time, and we’re more generous with our time.

All right, so what’s this “need for accommodation” down at the bottom of Yaden’s list? Well, experiences that invoke awe in us challenge our world view in some way. They violate our expectations. And when an experience challenges our previous ideas about how the world works, or our place in it – especially if it challenges our place in the world – we feel kind of off-kilter, and our brain needs to try to fix it to get back to something that feels more like settled certainty – something more familiar. And this striving, this need to get back to understanding, is what researchers mean by “need for accommodation.” And usually we accommodate by either rejecting the experience or revising our expectations, adjusting our mental constructs of the world and how it works.

So this need for accommodation is where awe gets really interesting, especially for this conference, because it points squarely at a relationship between science and spirituality. As you know, most scientists shy away – for career reasons, they shy away from using words like “spirituality” and “religion” in their work, unless they are specifically studying some aspect of those. You won’t find those words in a paper on neutrons, stars or genetics, right? But the study of awe inevitably brings us so close to spirituality as to make avoiding them nearly impossible.

And the title of one really seminal study hints at this: “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual and aesthetic emotion.” And authors Keltner and Haidt write: “Awe is central to the experience of religion, politics, nature and art. Fleeting and rare, experiences of awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways.” 

And then David Yaden adds this: “Awe is the every person’s spiritual experience.”

Awe has always been central to the formation and maintenance of religions. Theologian Frederick Bookner said, quote: “Religions start with a lump in the throat or with the bush going up in flames, the rain of flowers, the dove coming out of the sky.” 

Well, I certainly feel the lump in the throat every time I see that barber video. So, awe taps into the deepest parts of us and our relationship with reality, and it changes us there in ways that feel religious or spiritual. Does any of that sound like the spiritual core to you?

Awe, order and accommodation

Well, there’s a reason religious buildings are so vast and so beautiful. They are designed to invoke awe – to make us feel small, but also deeply connected with each other and with a higher power, a larger reality. And that need for accommodation, especially when the awe experience is hard to explain or mysterious in some way, leads many people to assign supernatural causes to whatever invoked the awe. 

So religion and awe can kind of feed one another. And when people study this stuff, what they find is that humans are uncomfortable with the idea of randomness. Even when the world is random, we presume that some agent, some author, is behind what we perceive. For example, given random strings of numbers, college students who had just experienced awe were even more likely to say that the numbers were arranged by a person. And then when awe researchers manipulate the experiment so that subjects have less personal control, people show an even greater tendency to assume that there are hidden agents pulling hidden strings. So the awesomeness of this video makes people more likely to think there must be actual hidden strings controlling this fidget spinner, especially if they already think that the space program is a hoax. (Laughter) 

When we feel out-of-control – like when we struggle to keep up with rapid social and technological change – awe makes us even more likely to see puppetmasters where there are none. So awe can make us prone to conspiracy theories and other kinds of manipulation. And I’ll say more about that in a few minutes.

Let me point out that experience of awe can lead to different responses in us – different ways of accommodating. A few years ago after presenting on my Seven Candles workshop, which is designed to make audiences feel awe from science, a man came up to me afterwards, and he said, “JD, that was the most convincing proof of God I’ve ever experienced.” Well, the woman right behind him in line came up and said, “JD, that was the most comprehensive talk I’ve ever heard on why there’s no need for a God.”(Laughter) 

Well, they each experienced the same presentation, but he accommodated his awe by invoking God, and she accommodated with natural laws. And both of those are reasonable and valid. It’s natural for us to do this because we crave explanations – so much so that most of us tend toward quick accommodation. It’s basically jumping to conclusions. And we all do it to some degree. 

Well, there are three main ways we accommodate. We can dismiss the experience; we can assume that human or mystical agents are causing it; or we can get curious, abiding in that space of not knowing. And that last option requires flexible mental frameworks that can accommodate ambiguity and mystery, at least for a while.

And these three options actually fall into two broad categories. Most people – most of us – are explainers. Feeling that need for accommodation is kind of uncomfortable – it’s unsettling, and it makes us want to get to some answer – something familiar, quickly. When they’re exposed to awe-inducing stimuli like this photo, explainers explain: It must be a trick, or some hidden agent must have arranged it. 

And these are normal responses. Let me suggest that both of these responses are a form of spiritual bypassing. When we find ourselves approaching our spiritual core, we tend to beat a hasty retreat for the familiar solid ground of rote explanations of what’s familiar. 

A much smaller portion of people respond by wondering. And that phrase, “awe and wonder,” was made for these folks. Striving to digest the awe experience leads wonderers to re-examine their previous ideas about how the world works, rather than jumping to comfortable conclusions. So wonderers tend to sit in awe longer, asking questions rather than jumping to conclusions, because these folks are more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. They’re able to kind of suspend their need for answers and simply enjoy feeling the awe.

And it turns out that wonderers have another gift. They experience awe more easily than explainers do. Wonderers are described in psychology literature as “the dispositionally awe-prone.” They are more likely than most people to feel awe in any given situation. These awe-prone people are also more likely to describe themselves as part of very large categories of identity like “humanity” or “earthling,” rather than smaller categories like “my neighborhood” or “my company.” Awe-proneness even shows up in the brain – in the activity of the anterior cortex. 

Interestingly, awe-proneness closely correlates with a sense of well-being – a word we’ve heard a lot this week. What do we mean by “a sense of well-being”? Well, for starters, we could just look at those kids’ faces, right? And you may have covered this earlier in the week when I was not paying attention, but there are actually two kinds of well-being described in the psychology literature – the hedonic and eudaemonic. And I know this may have been touched on earlier this week, but just a quick review here. The word hedonic comes from the same root as hedonism, and refers to happiness, pleasure, satisfaction. Eudaemonia comes from the Greek words for “good spirit,” and refers to feeling that your existence is personally meaningful. People with eudaemonic well-being express themselves freely. They enjoy their chosen activities intensely. They pursue excellence and try to achieve their fullest potential. And all of this because they have that deep sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. Everyone has both kinds of well-being, more or less, and both of them are good and healthy ways of being well and healthy. But awe-prone people – the wonderers – enjoy more eudaemonic well-being. 

This suggests that we may be able to boost our own eudaemonia just by seeking out and savoring experiences of awe. And for me personally, that means seeking awe in the natural world and in the science that describes it. Lightning storms are a really easy example. But researchers say tall trees, even tall buildings, are enough. The intricacy of a leaf – anything that feels vast, that takes us out of our everyday grind. 

During and after being in awe, we are more generous with our time, our efforts, and our money. We behave more ethically. We shift our attention from material things to the sublime and profound, and from a day-to-day rat-race focus to broader implications, to bigger-picture perspectives. Our critical thinking sharpens. We are more humble. We are more likely to identify ourselves with larger categories, such as ethnicity or humanity, rather than smaller categories like family or occupation. We value experiences more than possessions. 

Awe and learning

And all of those statements come straight out of the research. So the effects of awe on us are, themselves, awesome. Awe makes us better people. The most common setting where people feel awe is in nature. And my close call with lightning is kind of an extreme example, but when I take to heart what science reveals about physical reality, I experience awe. 

And here’s a recent example just from February 2024. There was a genetic study published that revealed that our complex nervous systems are only possible because we have genes from a retrovirus that infected a fish ancestor millions of years ago. And those viral genes allowed for the myelin insulation sheath that’s on our nerve cells – brains couldn’t work without that. Turns out that a full 40% of mammal genes contain bits of DNA that were provided by viruses that infected our ancestors. Wow, right?

So I read a study like that, and my eyebrows go up and I go, “Wow!” (Laughter) And often I say it out loud, which makes Ann [JD’s spouse] come over to see, you know, what’s going on. And when this happens, all of the characteristics of awe are in play for me, because studies like that, new revelations about nature – they open up vast new areas of understanding about myself, my ancestry, and they violate my expectations about illness and suffering and the mysterious ways of the world. 

It’s tempting to conclude that science is awesome, but it’s nature that’s awesome. Science reveals nature’s awesomeness in ever-vaster, more awe-inspiring detail. Nature and the science that reveals it keep providing me with new opportunities to feel awe, and hopefully to become a better person as a result. You know, just in the last couple years, we’ve learned there are plants that can count and remember and listen, even without ears. We know that slime molds can remember things long after they learn them, even after spending an entire year in a freezer. Bacteria pass on learnings about their environment through four generations of cell division with nothing remotely like a brain. There’s this whole new branch of science investigating what’s called basal cognition – the intelligence of single cells. We recently learned that viruses can infect other viruses and turn them into zombies. There’s a rapidly expanding catalog of previously-unknown RNA molecules with important functions other than making proteins – molecules that are upending our understanding of genetics. Mars has enough underground water to cover the entire surface a mile deep. Recent publications – we’ve seen gorgeous and enlightening photos from the Euclid and Webb Space Telescope. You know, awesome revelations like this get published all the time. And they’re easy to miss in the chaos and noise of our current media overwhelm. All the ones I just mentioned showed up in my monthly newsletter, however, just this year. So that’s one option if you want to share in the awe along with me.

Feeling connected to nature and suspending my desire for certainty and letting myself experience awe and wonder makes me happier, makes my life feel more meaningful and connected, more eudaemonic. This brings us back to religion and spirituality. Awe is not inherently religious, but as I said a few minutes ago, it’s hard to separate from religion and spirituality even for hard-nosed scientists. For example, sociologists were puzzled about why religiousness is so strongly correlated with eudaemonia. It is. People who are devoutly religious have a stronger sense of purposeful well-being. They have more eudaemonia than people who are not religious. You know, an obvious conclusion is that church communities are more supportive, or that something about religious faith gives us a sense of trust and well-being. But those don’t pan out when you dig into it. 

A study in 2012 and two more in 2014 helped answer this question. It turns out that more than thoughts, more than beliefs, frequency of church attendance, or social connections made at church, or even other positive emotions like pride, happiness, or amusement – more than any of those, the so-called “self-transcendent” emotions of awe, gratitude, love, and peace were the most strongly correlated with a sense of well-being, with awe standing out at the top of that list. It seems that religion is a place where many people experience awe, and it’s awe that improves their sense of well-being.

The author of the 2012 study, researcher Patty Van Kaplan, wrote, “Awe seems to be a necessary condition for outcomes that are a function of religiosity and spirituality. Awe activates the connection between religion and behavioral intentions.” 

So this creates a virtuous cycle. Awe creates meaningfulness, which we experience as profound or spiritual, which then makes us more likely to experience awe. I haven’t attended that many sessions this week, but the ones I did attend, I kept saying to myself: “Yeah, awe is what ties all of this together.” Awe is kind of a direct route into the spiritual core.

In 2023, a team at Yale conducted a randomized, controlled clinical trial on long COVID patients, just published in May 2025 – just last month. And they found that as little as 30 seconds of awe each day reduced depression in the intervention group by 17%, reduced stress by 12%, and increased feelings of well-being by 16%. The intervention was just asking patients to take a few seconds three times a day for awe, following this very simple mnemonic: “Give your full attention to something like the veins on a leaf or the scale of the universe. Wait, take a pause, for this attention-giving. Exhale and expand whatever you’re feeling.” That’s it. And that little intervention had these stunning outcomes in the intervention group. So, awe is powerful medicine – mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

You may remember me saying earlier that we can’t really be self-conscious when we’re feeling awe, but the opposite is true, too. We can’t experience awe if we’re self-conscious or distracted. My most powerful awe experience was seeing the total eclipse of the sun in August of 2017. And I was really psyched to experience that again in April 2024, and to try and capture it somehow with photography. And as it happened, I was distracted with my equipment just as the ???. The experience was diminished for me. So we have to be open to awe if we want the benefits of awe.

By analogy, you know if you throw a rock into churning white water, you’re not going to see the ripples it makes. Even something much smaller than a rock – when thrown into a still pond, the ripples are just obvious. So awe experiences are a little like the rock. If the mind is still unopened we can take it in more fully. 

Silence and explosions

One of Ann’s most memorable experiences happened while we were hiking the rainforest trail. We crossed a small stream, and something drew us to leave the trail and just walk upstream. And sometimes Ann can be a bit talkative, and so at some point I have suggested that we just explore in silence. And we soon found ourselves in a dark, misty grotto fed by a waterfall – kind of like this one. This is not the exact one on the screen, but it has the same feeling. And we swam together in a heavenly pool, in the most beautiful and alive place we’d ever been. Ann still describes it as a powerful spiritual awakening. And she says she was only able to experience the awe of that place because not talking allowed her mind to be still and open.

If there are any veterans, especially combat veterans, here today, I need to offer a quick heads-up for everybody, because this next part includes the sights and sounds of explosions that may be startling – so please take care of yourself; I won’t be offended if you just need to to leave the room. 

My 11th grade chemistry teacher required a term project each semester. My proposal: building a detailed plan for demolishing the school building using engineered explosives. (Laughter) My project would include how to make the explosives from scratch. I added that I would need copies of the school blueprints (laughter) because my project could someday save the school district money on demolition if they ever decided to build a new high school on the same site. Well, needless to say, Mr. Stenclik quietly suggested a different project. Oh, if a 17-year-old made a proposal like that today, they would certainly be arrested. The reason for that will make an appearance here in a few minutes. 

No doubt my chemistry teacher’s decision was a wise one. But I was undeterred  – not in wanting to destroy this school, I actually love school – but in wanting to learn how to make explosions, how to blow stuff up. So as soon as we finished the unit on redox reactions, I realized that my dad’s welding equipment offered a place to begin. Mr. Stenclik actually checked my work for balancing the chemical equation for oxidizing acetylene with pure oxygen. And I suspect that he knew exactly why I was asking, but we didn’t talk about it. (Laughter)

Anyhow, talk about awe. That first balloon bomb, held over a candle at the end of my dad’s longest bamboo pole, punched me in the chest like a thunderclap. The fireball was about two feet in diameter. It blew out the candle and charred the grass underneath it. And my first my first words after the stunning silence were: “Wow.” “Again, bigger!”

Now, when a 17-year-old boy needs a balloon that’s bigger than a regular balloon – I still make condom bombs once in a while, and I still feel awe every time. Using welding tanks It’s kind of hard to measure the gases precisely. So the explosion isn’t quite as big as is possible, but it’s enough. And you have to be there to really feel the punch. But I want to share a video. The echoes give a clue as to how loud this is.

You see all the concrete blocks on the left. Well, there’s the camera solidly strapped to those. Here’s that same explosion in slow motion from that angle. And watch how the camera shakes when the shock wave hits. So I’m 17, and entranced with the awesome power of chemistry. And I still wanted more, bigger, brighter. And this was long before the internet – you know, I still had hair. But a friend gave me a one-page catalog of dry chemicals that were available through a mail-order company in Kansas called American Patriot Fireworks. And apparently they’re still around. They’re actually on Facebook. 

I have always loved fireworks. They combine so many aspects of awe – you know, those thunderous explosions, the beauty of vivid colors, the experience of being in large crowds experiencing awe together. You know, you’ve heard that sound of awe  – “Ooh!”, right? Well, we’re going to consider the darker side of awe in crowds in a few minutes.

But anyway, I called this company, and they sent me an order form. So here I am at 17; I ordered a few pounds of these chemicals for my after-school job. (Yeah, I delivered the same talk in civic groups and stuff, so you’re going to have to research the chemicals on your own.) So I sent him a check for my after school job and I signed the form testifying that, “Why yes, I am at least 25 years old.” (Laughter) What’s eight years among friends?

Over the next 14 years, I filled plastic film cans – remember those? I filled film cans and pill bottles. I filled them with flash powder – the same stuff that photographers used to use before flash balls. And it turns out, if you pack it tight enough, flash powder makes quite a bang – much, much more than a condom bomb – and a blindingly bright flash to go with it. I always used my Estes model rocketry manual left over from my 4H rocket phase so I could detonate them from a safe distance using electricity.

So for the next 14 years I entertained guests and blew up rotten stumps on the family farm, scared teenagers on summer camp overnights, and I augmented July 4th with style. So much awe in such small packages. 

Awe is not always awesome

But then, in April 1995, a right-wing American terrorist used ammonium nitrate fertilizer soaked in diesel fuel to destroy the Oklahoma City federal building on a busy work day. He killed 168 people, 19 of them children. That day, the fun went out of explosions for me. I never wanted to be associated with that kind of explosion. And as you may know, the FBI started keeping a much closer eye on fertilizer, let alone firework-grade chemicals. So I used up all my remaining chemicals in one final gloriously big bang. It was still awesome, but my heart wasn’t in it. Not like before. 

Awe is not always awesome. The military strategy used in the US invasion act – you may remember, in 2003, they called it “shock and awe.” Well, military strategists actually prefer the term “rapid dominance.” And a similar approach had informed the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The idea is that you use overwhelming power to paralyze the enemy with, well, shock and awe. But is this awe or something else?

Here’s a short clip of the accidental explosion of a storage warehouse in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2020, from pretty far away. Even in slow motion, it happens so fast, and is so massive, so vast, that the first time I saw this video I had a strong reaction that I thought was awe. But there was no wonder. No wonder came with it. Just a sinking, kind of awful feeling, just to know that such destructiveness could even exist. Wow. Notice that it’s a distressed kind of “wow.” It’s not about glory and wonder, but something else, something horrible. So you know, there. Vastness and extreme speed and destructiveness, connectedness in empathy with the poor victims who never saw it coming. All the physical indicators of awe, and a need for accommodation, a striving to make sense of this. 

I guess most of us felt something like that when we saw the World Trade Center fall. Yes. But is it awe or horror? What’s the difference? Well, researchers Derek Taylor and Yuko Ochida dug into this question in a 2019 study, and they concluded that awe and horror are both responses to vastness with a need for accommodation, but with opposite effects on how we do the accommodating. Awe enhances and strengthens our systems of meaning, even as it challenges those systems, whereas horror shatters our systems of meaning. In their experiments, there was a huge difference in the flavor of the need for accommodation. Awe required subjects to accommodate what the researchers called “spiritual vastness,” while horror required accommodation of extremity and chaos – “expansive vastness” versus “destructive vastness.”

Now, the explosion in Beirut was an accident, not war. But I think “shock and awe” as the name of a military strategy is a misnomer. I think it’s “shock and horror.” You know, there are school buses and ambulances in this photo. There’s nothing awesome about death and destruction – it’s horror. So rapid dominance is probably an effective war-fighting strategy, but it’s not awe.

There’s another dark side to awe, even when it is indeed all that we are feeling. It’s all we feel when we belt out our favorite song at a concert, or chant for our city’s team at the Super Bowl or the NBA finals, or when we chant slogans at political rallies like “USA!”, which happened at both parties’ conventions last year. Doing anything emotionally powerful with a lot of others makes us feel the vastness of our combined power and feel strongly connected with those around us. It connects us emotionally with a tribe, which is probably why awe evolved in the first place. Awe cements the bonds among our people, so that we can go into battle together, whether that’s battle against other tribes or against the elements. Researchers have demonstrated that awe played a role in the Rwandan genocide and in the South African struggle against the apartheid. As awe dissolves our ego and we merge into a tribal group consciousness, we become vulnerable to manipulation – for good or ill. And as you know, there are plenty of people out there who would love to manipulate us, right? Facing global crises that require global cooperation, tribalism is just about the last thing we need. So, be wary of this – whatever tribe you might find yourself in, especially if there’s slogan chanting.

Earlier, I mentioned that awe, when it’s combined with feeling out of control, makes us prone to conspiracy theories. Well, many of us are feeling out of control lately. So watch for this. Awe can be used to manipulate us.

Teaching awe

Awe can also be used to manipulate people for good, like in science education. When I started teaching high school science, I soon discovered that every class period contains at least one kid who wants to blow stuff up. Raise your hand if you had a great science teacher at some point in your education. Yeah, right? Lots of us. I’m going to guess that they were great partly because they did amazing demonstrations, right? Awe increases students’ openness to learning that they try to make sense of events that simply don’t fit their previous understandings. For example, watching a bowling ball and a feather fall at the same rate in a vacuum chamber – it’s startling. And it reliably elicits responses like “wow!” and “what the!?”, right? It invites students of all ages to reconsider how they understand weight and density, gravity, motion and air.

Well, science teachers call demonstrations like this “discrepant events,” because they highlight a discrepancy between students’ mental models about how the world works and how the world really works. Discrepant events use the power of awe, especially that need-for-accommodation part, to keep students engaged in wonder while also highlighting the concept we want them to learn. Discrepant events are always a hit in science museums, and of course some YouTubers are making a living by recording them and explaining them. 

Well, homemade explosions in school are the ultimate discrepant event. And like me, some kids are going to make them anyway. So I figured I might as well make sure they do it safely and learn some chemistry along the way. Here’s that same oxy-acetylene explosion as the condom bombs, but done in a milk jug carefully measured. And I always made students do it from scratch. Here we go. 

I’m telling you. Another option is in line with teaching about states of matter. So carbon dioxide in the form of dry ice goes directly from solids to gas solid to gas at room temperature. In a soda bottle with some water, it quickly reaches the failure pressure of plastic soda bottles. You just have to add dry ice and screw on the cap. And it’s essential that you watch from a safe distance. Here’s what I mean. 

So I quickly learned that I needed to call the police before we did this because they were going to get calls from neighbors about explosions and gunshots up at the school. So teaching science is when I began this work that I do now. I was feeling the awe along with my students, and it felt spiritual to me. It still does.

That day on Dead Pony Ridge, while we were all still bubbling with the thrill of the strike, the whole group went to look for the tree that got struck. It was a tall pine and there was a strip of bark missing stripped off in a spiral from the top of the tree to the base. Tattered remnants of bark littered the ground and hung from nearby branches like some kind of shrapnel. We were pretty sure this was going to kill the tree, and the sight of it is burned into my memory.

Awe is a powerful emotion intimately interwoven with spirituality and religion. Awe makes us feel small but deeply connected. It elevates our scales of identity. It makes us more generous, and increases our sense that the world is meaningful. Many of us tend to skip the wonder stage of awe by jumping to conclusions about hidden or supernatural agents, while others of us are able to bask in childlike wonder, embracing the unknown and ambiguous as we seek deeper understandings. Wonderers experience awe more readily. Awe is closely related to horror, but we can feel the difference inside ourselves. Awe can be used to manipulate us, for nefarious political purposes and for benevolent educational purposes. Awe offers us connection, wonder, joy, growth, transcendence, purpose, and reverence. Awe can be the basis for a rich spiritual life filled with eudaemonia and love for others. Awe is a superhighway to our spiritual core, and we can experience it anytime we want, just by experiencing reality with attention and intention.

I want to leave you with something beautiful: the grand finale of the fireworks we saw on Bastille Day 2014, just above Carcassonne in southern France. Ann and I were about a half a mile away, and this was the last minute of a fireworks show that lasted close to an hour. 

May our lives be filled with all the colors bursting and sparkling the light of learning and awe into our world. Thank you.