The
Concept:
If you look at something without labeling it as good
or bad, you will have a sense of awe. This is how the artists feel and how
Vincent Van Gogh – a post-impressionist painter felt when he painted the “chair”
in 1888. His painting of chair was worth more than twenty five million dollars
a few years back and probably more now.
Dictionary defines awe as “an overwhelming feeling
of reverence, admiration, fear, etc. produced by that which is grand, sublime,
extremely powerful, or the like”. According to Paul Pearsall, the well-known
neurobiologist and positive psychologist, awe is “an overwhelming and
bewildering sense of connection with a startling universe that is usually far
beyond the narrow band of our consciousness”. He refers to awe as our eleventh
emotion, the other emotions being love, fear, sadness, embarrassment,
curiosity, pride, enjoyment, despair, guilt, and anger. Research findings
indicate that nature and art/music were frequently cited as the eliciting
stimulus for positive awe, and the awe response is indeed our maximum state of
full and total observation.
Paul Pearsall contends that living an awe-filled life does not mean avoiding pain; awe can be felt in the face of death as well as in watching a birth. Awe makes a difference between languishing and flourishing, by consciously engaging and reflecting on the world outside of the self. He reminds us that "We are all riding around together on one of the universe’s billion fragile, cracking, exploding, rocks, on which even our existence is statistical fluke beyond one in billions. Sucked to our gas-covered rock by an invisible force, we’re being spun around seventeen miles per second while at the same time whizzing at nineteen miles per second around a nuclear exploding fireball that, even though it’s ninety million miles away, holds our rock in its orbit with its invisible force, and, if our rock got too close, could cook us all in a nanosecond”. He asks – are you not in awe? We have indeed allowed our awe response to atrophy from disuse!
Background
of unhappiness
According to Eckhart Tolle almost everyone carries
in his or her energy field an accumulation of old emotional pain called
pain-body. The pain-body is not just our individual pain but also includes the
pain suffered by countless humans throughout the history of humanity (the
collective psyche of humanity) and it is in every human DNA. Pain bodies like
to both inflict and suffer pain. Examples include:
- Falling in love or attraction of pain bodies
- Media and human addiction to unhappiness
- Women's collective pain bodies as they have been killed and suppressed by all cultures and religions
- Countries and nations' collective emotional pain
- Children's pain bodies which manifest as moodiness and is affected by parents' pain bodies
It is a common wisdom that negative thoughts have
lower vibrational frequency and they resonate with and feed our pain bodies. On
the other hand the voice of ego constantly disrupts the natural state of our
well-being with negativity and superficial labeling of everything and everyone.
When we stop doing that the depth comes back to our lives and we can experience
the sense of awe. In other words, we should not seek the happiness but the
freedom from unhappiness which is the negative interpretation of life
situations.
In
brief
When we are in a negative state of mind we should
remind ourselves that negativity is always ego. Once we are aware of this, our
identity will shift from ego to awareness. Being aware is knowing that we are
experiencing and applying our full and deepest consciousness to where, with
whom, and why we are, and that’s what can inspire profound awe. We can then
stop the darkness by bringing in the light of living an awe-filled life.
#Awe #VanGogh #11thEmotion
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