Reminder that experiencing awe quite literally improves your health.
Awe, which has only been studied properly in the last two decades, has been shown to:
• Reduce stress
• Trigger the release of oxytocin
• Lower levels of inflammatory cytokines
Being made to feel small (experiencing “self-diminishment”) even quells our negative self-talk, by deactivating the part of the cortex involved with how we perceive ourselves.
Through awe we become less attuned to ourselves and more attuned to the wider world. Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley said: “We are at this cultural moment of narcissism and self-shame and criticism and entitlement; awe gets us out of that.”
Neuroscientists define awe it as the emotional response to something vast that defies (and changes) our existing frame of reference of something.
What's one way to experience it? Travel to your nearest cathedral and gaze upwards.
Gothic architecture was built for this very purpose - through maximum height and maximum light. Achieving this at vast scale was a critical breakthrough by medieval engineers, who pioneered the flying buttresses, the pointed arch, and various other innovations which made taller and thinner walls possible.
Those builders also believed that light itself was divine, and that when it poured in through the great windows it elevated one's consciousness to the heavens.
As English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said: “The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.”
Source:
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
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