I’ve been thinking about awe lately. I’m wondering if maybe it’s not that I can’t feel it, but that I don’t feel it in response to the standard stars and sunsets and religious rituals.
(Probably the thing that got me thinking this was telling @justice-turtle about how I can’t feel emotions that I’m under too much pressure to feel. Rituals and sunsets and fucking stars have so much baggage regarding how one ought to feel about them.)
Maybe awe is the feeling I get sometimes reading about mental experiences that are foreign to me, neither good nor bad but different. Maybe awe is in headspaces and phantom wings, the feeling like seeing the multiverse spread out before you and you’ll never leave your own little patch of it but it’s enough, it’s enough to see it and to know that there are people walking the paths you’ll never take.
Maybe awe is the feeling of reading really well-done porn for a kink that you’re completely not into. The words are filled with some foreign kind of power, power you can’t quite directly perceive but you can hear the whoosh as it flies over your head. You’ll never feel it yourself but it’s enough to know it’s there and to know that there are people who can, who can feel the power in those words and take it into themselves until their bones hum with it and their nervous system sparks.
Sometimes it’s enough, and maybe that’s what it means.
For me, awe is that feeling at the moment right before I comprehend something far beyond myself, that moment where unconscious realization shapes my perspective before conscious understanding has the chance to go in and blind me with outcome bias.
Awe is the rare moment I get when, for just a second, I can really see what I am looking at.
The closest I’ve ever come to understanding religion came from me meta-ing the concept of identity into a spiritual mess. I just kept thinking how I was me but I could be not me but then I wouldn’t be me until I felt, just for a moment, that I understood it all. I chase those feelings whenever I can find them.
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#(February 2016) #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the wondrous variety of sapient life
Brinens and Things 
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