The Lost Emotion of the Mystics

What Awe Was Before We Lobotomized It

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Awe used to leave people shaking. Now it has a playlist.

Every major mystical tradition in human history understood something we’ve quietly forgotten: that the most important emotional experiences aren’t the comfortable ones. They’re the ones that frighten you.

Entire industries exist to help us “manage” our emotions — as if they were wayward children or insubordinate employees. But what if the mystics were right and we’ve been managing away the very experiences that could most change us?

Most people don’t want to be scared. 99% of Americans have not tried skydiving or bungee jumping, and truth be told, neither have I — leaping from a moving aircraft at 10,000 feet seems like lunacy to me. But there’s another extreme challenge, much closer to home, that most are equally unwilling to tackle: it’s the thing sitting quietly but uneasily in the untrodden recesses of your own mind, trying not to be noticed.

The journey to yourself is also scary. It means coming face to face with everything you find so unacceptable that you’ve refused it entry into conscious life. And here's the problem: the treasure is always in the cave you least want to enter — and most people just don't want to go in.

So what do you do when you want the prize but won’t enter the ring? You settle. For awe-lite: wellness apps, some dabbling in meditation, the Instagram sunset. Echoes of the great teachers, repackaged and sanitized by an industry that profits from your returning but not your arriving.

The German word for awe is Ehrfurcht (pronounced air-forsht). Its literal meaning combines “Ehre” (honor) and “Furcht” (fear). It describes a feeling of respectful fear or reverent awe — a profound respect mixed with a sense of the sublime, overwhelming, or sacred. Theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto described the idea of mysterium tremendum et fascinans — the mystery that simultaneously repels and attracts. To touch the sacred is to encounter fear.

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

—Exodus 3:4-6

“After seeing this universal form, which I have never seen before, I am gladdened, but at the same time my mind is disturbed with fear. Therefore please show me Your original form, O Lord of lords, O abode of the universe.”

—Gita 11.45

[The Godhead] is not divine nature or substance, but the devouring ferocity of purity that a person is able to approach only with an equal purity. Since all Being goes up in it as if in flames, it is necessarily unapproachable to anyone still embroiled in Being.

—Friedrich Schelling

These examples are intense. They’re also correct.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: what do we actually want? My gut says most people want the real thing — truth, depth, the particular aliveness that comes from having faced something genuinely difficult. As a former teacher once put it: why eat chalk when you can eat cheesecake? The apps aren’t chalk exactly. But they’re not cheesecake either. And somewhere, underneath the playlists, I suspect you already know the difference.

The 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the story of Roy Neary, an electric company lineman who has a brief but extreme encounter with an alien vessel that permanently changes his life. Though terrified by the experience, as if called by a higher power, he can’t let it go. To his family’s shock and horror, he becomes a man possessed; obsessed with finding the location of the next encounter—the big one.

Roy is the embodiment of Ehrfurcht. He is willing to confront a host of real fears to accomplish his goal. At the end, when even most of his fellow travelers (those who were also called) come up short, he keeps climbing until he has scaled a mountain to meet “them” face to face. He’s afraid. He’s awestruck. It’s beautiful.

So what’s actually on offer here — beyond the intensity, beyond the examples from traditions most of us weren’t raised inside?

This: the moments that have most expanded you were probably also the ones that frightened you most. The loss that remade you. The falling in love that left you exposed and slightly terrified. The piece of music that opened something you didn’t know was closed. The night sky that made you feel briefly, vertiginously small. You didn’t choose those moments. But you were changed by them.

That’s Ehrfurcht. And it’s been available to you all along.

The restlessness that drives people toward the apps — that’s not weakness. It’s a real hunger pointing at a real thing. The problem isn’t the hunger. It’s that we’ve been handed appetizers and told they’re the meal.

What changes when you stop being afraid of being afraid? When you recognize the trembling not as something to manage but as a signal that you’re close to something that matters; that the ground beneath you is, in fact, holy?

You become more alive.

Q: When was the last time something genuinely frightened and moved you at the same time — and what did you do with it?

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