#271： The Power of Wonder
Episode Stats
Summary
Robert Fuller explores the psychology and biology of wonder in his new book, "Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality." In this episode, we discuss the benefits of experiencing wonder in our lives on a regular basis, how wonder shaped the lives and careers of men like John Muir and William James, and whether we can take action to experience more of it in our own lives.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. We've all
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likely experienced those moments in life in which our breath is literally taken away.
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At the same time that we feel existentially small, our spirits seem to greatly expand.
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It's a singular feeling that we call wonder. But why do we feel wonder? What purpose does it serve
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in our survival and flourishing as humans? Why does it get harder and hard to feel wonder as you get
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older? And is it possible to recapture that lost wonder to manufacturing some way? My guest today
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explores these questions in his book, Wonder from Emotion to Spirituality. His name is Robert
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Fuller and he's a professor of religious studies at Bradley University. Today on the show, Robert and
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I discuss the psychology and biology of wonder, why researchers haven't really studied wonder,
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and the benefits of experiencing in our lives on a regular basis. We also explore how wonder
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shaped the lives and careers of men like John Muir and William James, the psychologist,
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how religion ritualizes wonder, and whether we can take action to experience more wonder
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in our lives. This podcast is going to leave you wondering a lot about wonder, I guarantee
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it. After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash wonder.
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Well, it's good to be here and talking about a subject that's been captivating my interest
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Right. It's the topic of wonder. You've written several books about it, about spirituality and
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sort of the interconnection between culture, physiology, psychology of wonder and spirituality.
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The book that I read was Wonder from Emotion to Spirituality.
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No, you know, I've been a student of religion for, I've been a professor here for 39 years.
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I've been thinking about it for even longer than that. And your mind takes different turns
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and looks at different angles. But I look at religions from around the world. They have held
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different beliefs, doctrines, rituals. But it strikes me that the one thing common is
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that all of their rituals, all of their doctrines evoke wonder in individuals. And I began to realize
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that this was one commonality of religions throughout the world.
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So, let's start with the most obvious question. What is wonder?
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Wonder is a feeling state. It's a feeling state triggered in our broad class of emotion. And
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emotion, by the way, is an aspect of human thought, feeling, behavior. It's probably the
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least studied by psychologists and physiologists. But wonder is clearly an emotion, and it's
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triggered in our system, like most emotions, as a startle response. Any of us can imagine walking
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down a path alone and hearing rustling in the bushes. And we're instantly motivated and even
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alarmed by this startle response to, quote, wonder, what is it that caused that? Does it create
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opportunity for me? Does it create threat for me? And it mobilizes thought, behavior, communication.
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So, wonder is a class of all of our emotions, but probably the least studied of them.
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Why is it the least studied? Because you talk about the book, like most of the other emotions,
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like anger or happiness, they've been written about and great to tell since, you know, for
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centuries. But why has wonder gotten the short shrift?
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Yeah, the study of emotion lags behind all other areas of psychology. And those emotions that have
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been studied are the ones that are easiest to trigger in a laboratory setting. And I know this from
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my own research, it's very easy to trigger anger. And especially, by the way, guilt is easy to trigger
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in an emotion in a laboratory setting. Wonder is very difficult. It requires something that will
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catch someone very unexpectedly and surpass their ability to interpret or understand that moment.
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So, it really lags behind, mostly because, one, it is difficult to reliably induce in a laboratory
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setting. And two, it doesn't fit into our normal model of why we have emotions. Remember, everything
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in natural selection in our long evolutionary history was shaped to create survival advantage. And it's
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sometimes very difficult to understand how it is that wonder, compared to, for example, anger, fear,
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guilt, gives humanity survival advantage. So, here, too, it conceptually lags behind interest in other
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emotions. Well, before we get into the, you know, the sort of the theories about the adaptive or the
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advantage wonder gives humans, let's talk more about wonder. Like, so, you said it's, wonder isn't a
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moment we feel like when we're kind of caught off guard. Yep. It's, we want to explore, but what, I mean,
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and you say it's, I think in the book you talk, wonder involves a cluster of different emotions.
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It's not just, it's not just a single emotion. If we could, let's start with the Oxford English
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Dictionary definition of wonder. It says it's astonishment, mingled with perplexity and bewildered
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curiosity. And I think that's a good definition. It's, first of all, astonishment, but it's got this sense
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of curiosity, perplexity, being bewildered. So, it's an odd emotion state. Can I differentiate it
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from something? We often use awe as a similar emotion, awe and wonder. But I'm sure all of us
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have said, I was in awe of that person. And that is the evolutionary origin of awe, is I think when
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there was an alpha male, the largest gorilla in a horde of gorillas, for example, would induce
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awe in those smaller, not as strong, et cetera, and therefore follow the lead of that alpha male
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in the group. Awe has that. There's a sense of belittling by being confronted with something so
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grand, strong, that it's intimidating. Wonder does not have that sense of intimidation or
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subordination, but it also is being confronted with something much larger. So, I've come to think
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of wonder as whenever an emotional response, when we're confronted with something that's so vivid,
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so large, so beautiful, so true to us, that we're, if you will, astonished. We're perplexed.
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We're bewildered as to what is the source of this beauty? What is the source of this vitality? What is
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the source of this truth? So, there's bewilderment, astonishment, but without that kind of subordination
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or humbled feeling in that sense that awe would have.
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And you talk about, too, it is, in a way, passive. There's two modes. There's active and there's
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passive and wonder causes you to be more passive.
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Right. Another way that wonder doesn't fit into the typical family of emotions, although I might
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say that joy would be another emotion like this. But when you're under the momentary feeling state
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of emotion of wonder, there is a passivity. It doesn't lead to immediate fight-flight response.
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It has a kind of momentary contemplation, as we put earlier, this kind of bewildered curiosity,
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being perplexed. But it's a passive emotion. It doesn't lead to immediate physical action. Again,
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another reason why wonder, compared to other emotions, doesn't fit into the normal template
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of understanding this rare but very human emotional state.
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And I also, I liked how you talked in the book, and also that contemplation that wonder causes is
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like, it causes us to think about our place in the bigger picture, the bigger scheme of things.
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It does. Many emotions might cause us to focus on very specific, I'll even call it tunnel vision.
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If I go back to my image of walking down a path and hearing rustling in the bushes,
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this, when it triggers the startle response of fear, there is an immediate tunnel vision. We focus
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on the source of potential threat to us. We fight, flight, triggered by that. Wonder is so different
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in its sense of bewildered curiosity and perplexity. One contemplates what is the possible source of this
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grand beauty, this grand vitality. Think of looking down at a newborn baby. Think of looking at a sunset.
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Think of looking at an oak tree that goes 40 feet into the air. We sense, how is it that there's a universe
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that has this grandeur, this beauty? So we contemplate things larger than ourselves, forces that could have
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brought this into existence, that go well beyond us, our understanding, our powers in the world.
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So let's go back to the evolutionary advantages of wonder. So you talk about awe, that there could be an advantage
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to that sort of helps you find out who your leader is. There's clearly an evolutionary advantage to awe.
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Let's take guilt for a moment. Whenever we break the norms of our social group, we feel this powerful
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emotion of guilt. And it's there in us, it is a tight pressure, and we want to relieve that tension
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that's created by the emotion of guilt. And we'll do almost anything, apologize, humble ourselves,
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but in any way displayed to the group that we will once again conform to group morality.
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Guilt will motivate that. Wonder doesn't lead to those same kinds of things. It is more passive,
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and it's rare in that sense. So how do we understand that it came along? And to be honest,
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we don't know. Wonder is one of those many aspects of the human brain that seem to be
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come in package. I often like to link it this way. All of us have bought a car. And when we're
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looking for a certain thing, maybe we're looking for a moonroof, the moonroof comes with four other
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accessories. And if we want to buy the moonroof in our car, the other four accessories come in tow.
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It could be that the ability for abstract thought to contemplate causality that came along with the
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human brain for definite, immediate physical survival issues gave us the capacity to contemplate
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abstractly that is so important to wonder. And that this came along with our bigger cerebral cortex,
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and it isn't anything that evolution, quote, needed. But boy, once we have it, it's what makes us
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I mean, so what are the benefits of wonder? Like, what have we gotten from wonder?
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Well, the benefits go many ways. First of all, let's take emotion as the broad category of
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humanity and break it into two broad classes of emotion. One we could call negative emotions.
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We've all felt these fear. We felt anger. We have felt guilt. These would be examples.
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What they tend to do, again, is instantly mobilize fight or flight response. But they tend to make you
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interested in protecting yourself. And you protect yourself by avoiding what's threatening to you,
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what's caused anger to you, what's caused guilt for you. And you distance and protect and you draw
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away from your surroundings. Another class of emotion are the positive emotions. They're rare,
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but we can think of joy, being interested in things. So interest, joy, and wonder is so close to those.
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But unlike the negative emotions, which cause us to want to distance and avoid our surroundings,
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they mobilize approach. They mobilize engaging them, wanting to be more connected to what's around us.
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Joy certainly has done that. And we can see how that leads to social bonding.
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And we can see the evolutionary advantage of any emotion that leads to that. And certainly wonder has
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some of that. It is a joyful response. And it leads us to want to connect with what's there.
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So right away, we know that it's something that leads to greater connection, both socially and
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intellectually. And we want to contemplate what is it in the universe that makes, again, grand beauty,
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grand vitality, grand truth possible. And so it opens up our philosophical and
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greater spiritual sensibility about belonging to a grander universe. I might point out, by the way,
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it was Socrates who said that wonder is the emotion of philosophy and that all philosophy begins with
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this emotion. Again, this sense of cosmic mystery, cosmic perplexity, curiosity about what's grander than
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And so the way you're describing it, it seems like wonder isn't necessarily exclusive to religion. I mean,
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art, science could also- No. Yes. And I think sometimes in my personal tendency to connect
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religion and its rituals and its myths and stories to evoking the emotion of wonder, I sometimes maybe
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forget that it comes in many areas of life. I know people for whom music. All of a sudden, music will
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open us up to a sense of infinity and the sublime, taking us beyond our immediate moment to reaching out to
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the very source of beauty in the whole universe. I know people who staring into a microscope and seeing
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life and the vitality at the level of cells dividing and the beauty of just the process of
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life are moved to wonder. People looking up at a starry sky in the evening. And for me personally,
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if you were to say, where has wonder most reliably been triggered? I'll have to say it's going to
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planetarium shows. When I watch in astronomy and see the grandeur of the universe, I find myself in
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wonder. How is it that there is a universe at all and not just void and emptiness? And so this very
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sense of cosmic mystery is evoked. So we can find it in music and in art and sometimes even personal
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relationships, looking at another human being and being struck in front of me is a source of life
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and activity that I will never dominate or control. It's here to enjoy, not to manipulate.
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And so wonder can be triggered again in relationships, in relationships to nature,
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through scientific activity and music, many areas of life.
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So why is it, I guess maybe I'm being, from my experience, it seems like as a child, I experienced
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wonder more easily than I do as an adult. Does something happen in our brains or just in our life that
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causes us to not be able to experience wonder like we did when we were kids?
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Yeah, maybe this is a moral failure of us as we grow and become adults. I suppose some of it is
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this, wonder can only be triggered when there's surprise. I've often thought that if we could take
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someone back from even just 200 years ago and show them our automobiles, our airplanes, our television
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sets, that these would create wonder for them because of the startle response, the inexplicability
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of it. They can't, they have no conceptual categories to understand how this came to be and
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operate as it does. And because even though all of us don't know all the circuitry of a computer chip,
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et cetera, we have enough understanding of it that it can't quite give us that perplexity,
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that sense of astonishment. So I think some of it is just gaining greater causal understanding of
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reality, and that's going to be inevitable. So I think maybe it makes it rare, but I don't think
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it makes it therefore less precious. I think we come to enjoy and appreciate those moments of wonder
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even more. Well, and speaking of the benefits of wonder, makes us more open, more curious,
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thinking abstractly, big picture. You talk about individuals throughout your book whose lives
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were shaped, fundamentally shaped by an experience of wonder. One of those individuals was John Muir,
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the conservationist. How did wonder guide John Muir's career?
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John Muir was not well adapted to our physical reality. He lived after having been born in Wisconsin,
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and in his early life, by the way, liked to tinker by breaking things down. He literally tinkered with
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mechanical systems. And that's breaking a hole down to its smaller parts and working with them. And I
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call that curiosity about them. But something dramatic happened in his life as he moved out to California
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around the Sierra Nevada mountains, and he would go climbing. His whole emotional system went to break
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things down into smaller parts and to manipulate them. He went to an emotion of appreciation,
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wonder. And he talked about in his diaries, he uses the words wonder and rejoicing again and again,
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as he would walk alone into the mountains, and he would go alone. Now listen, I want to repeat that as
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an individual, he was not a business tycoon. He was not a self-made billionaire or something. He didn't,
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he wasn't adapted to the economic realities of America particularly, but we are all richer for
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his life. And his life was a life shaped by wonder. And by this, I mean that his immersion into nature,
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and as he would contemplate, what, how is there a source of life in this universe that set this into
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motion that he would see in the flora and fauna and mountains of rural California? This allowed him
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to appreciate life in and of itself, not for how he could manipulate it, not for what it did for him
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in any worldly economic advantage. He appreciated it for itself. And that emotion of empathy,
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of a love of life over and beyond its utilitarian concern, allowed him to form the Sierra Club,
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the greatest conservation movement, really in a sense in American history, at least it was the
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beginning of all of our interest in ecology and conservation. You know, how does this come from?
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From one emotional experience, the emotional experience of wonder as he was alone in nature.
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So the long-term utility was great. So wonder, while giving us very little in terms of short-term,
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worldly, adaptive fitness, triggers a caring for the world around us that is for the long-term good
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humanity. And so was it like his experience, was it a single event or was it just accumulation of
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just being in nature or does, does he, did he share what, what it was?
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Obviously there were some particular events, but for him, it was a lifetime shaped by wonder.
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He continued to return and always alone, by the way, into the mountains for weeks at a time
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to just renew this. You know, we, we sometimes think of religion as something that needs a building,
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a mosque, a synagogue, a temple, a church where we go this, but there's some truth to this. We do need
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someplace we can go for short periods to renew our sense of wonder in the universe. For John Muir,
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it wasn't a cathedral. It wasn't a building. Nature was his cathedral. By returning to the woods, by
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returning to the mountains, he could renew that sense of wonder that kept alive his care,
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his love for nature and his efforts to protect it and to sustain it in its purity. So it was more a
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lifetime of renewed wonder at the universe than particular events.
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So another person you talked about was William James, the father of modern psychology.
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William James was a medical doctor trained at Harvard, who then became the founder of the
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psychology department at Harvard and also in the philosophy department, one of the true well-rounded
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intellectuals. He too would go hiking in the, in the woods of New Hampshire to revive these
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experiences. One of his most interesting experiences, however, was through an intoxication experience.
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He had students in the psychology lab working on nitrous oxide and being the curious individually,
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was he just leaned over and breathed some. And in that one second, he had an induced mystical
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experience that convinced him for the rest of his life that no matter what it is that our five senses
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and science can tell us about reality, we are surrounded by a mystical more. And he would just
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take M-O-R-E with capital letters and more. It was his way of referring to God. Living at Harvard,
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living in an age shaped by modern social science, by modern philosophy, he was aware of the perplexities
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of finding literal doctrines in religion that can be said to be true across all cultures and time
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periods and compatible with science. He didn't look to the truth of religion in doctrine, belief,
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but he did believe that there were certain experiences that open us to this, as he called it,
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more to the universe. And that is wonder. For him, he had it in nature experiences. He had it this one
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time in the laboratory in this nitrous oxide moment, but he thrived in his whole philosophy of life
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was around the astonishment triggered by the emotion of wonder. Wonder that there's a more that exceeds
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all rational understanding, all of our scientific comprehension of what the universe is.
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It opens us to why is there a universe rather than just a void.
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So, it seems like wonder helped James sort of find a path between spirituality and science.
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Right. And I think many people listening to us right now have sometimes wondered,
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I guess the pun on this phrase there, how do I navigate this? Something in me yearns to know
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what is the highest reality to which I might connect my life? By that, we usually mean God.
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What is the source of all things? Why is there a universe here at all? What am I to do with my life?
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And as we try to navigate that, we also want to remain true to scientific understandings.
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We don't want to sacrifice our intellect and to accept ideas from an ancient world.
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And here's where, once again, the notion of wonder comes back to a life shaped by spirituality,
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having a sensibility for something more than what can be comprehended with just the rational
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intellect, a sensitivity, while still remaining open to what intellectual formulations we want to
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Yeah, I mean, it kind of raises an interesting question. Do you think exploring wonder scientifically
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Right. That is a great question. One of the first book reviews of my book on wonder was,
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Fuller managed to take all the wonder out of thinking about wonder because there are two
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chapters in the book that look at it in terms of modern evolutionary psychology. How did the brain
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get shaped through evolution to be able to be capable of wonder? And it gets technical. And so,
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yes, if you talk about wonder in terms of the brain mechanisms that are involved and all of the
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various intellectual debates and academe about some of these topics, it can be exacting and take a
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Well, going back to religion, so you kind of make the argument that wonder is sort of the origin of,
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you know, why we want to be religious, of rituals. Like, you know, part of what religions do is
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I think they do. Rituals are mysterious. Sacraments go beyond the logic and causal forces
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of our day-to-day reality. And when you immerse yourself in the rituals, and I'm thinking of Hindu
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rituals, Buddhist rituals, Christian rituals, Jewish rituals, Muslim rituals, and throughout the world,
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these rituals engage us in actions and understanding what causes things to be in our universe that go
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well beyond our day-to-day, if you will, technical, instrumental mindset. They trigger wonder.
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I mean, I'm imagining, like, do some of these rituals, like, they'll, like, base it off of a
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wondrous occasion that happened once, and then they try to systemize it so other people can
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vicariously experience that wonder experience that some founder?
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Well, that may be. It could be that someone had a wondrous experience, those, if you will,
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miraculous causing. And again, wonder is that perplexity. How did such a thing come to be?
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Because my normal understanding of the world cannot embrace that or conceptualize that. It takes you
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beyond that, shatters those understandings. And so, perhaps it was that event. But perhaps,
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too, it's just the use of fantasy. And some of our religious stories are just that, stories that,
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in the telling of them. And it's not so much an ancient past, but it's a way of triggering wonder
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Are there any examples of, like, non-religious groups that try to ritualize wonder to provide an
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existential framework for themselves or their followers?
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Wonder, of course, as we have looked at, isn't just an exclusive property of religion. It's there
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wherever. I think that there are. I mentioned that I have it when I go to planetariums, and I feel that.
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But I know in other countries, there are groups, I'm thinking of Japan. There are groups that gather
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together to hike into the mountains, for example, Mount Fuji, and to be there at sunrise. And just the whole
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event that they'll do collectively as a group, to walk to the top, to be there, as in the land of the
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rising sun, the sun rises in the east and casts its rays across the crests of the ocean to the islands
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of Japan, it triggers such a sense of wonder. That what is greater than humanity that has brought this
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grand, beautiful universe into existence and wanting to momentarily open our lives to sense that
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grandeur, to sense that causal of all beauty, that causal reality. So I think that there are
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groups that do this. Just as we can appreciate music or art without belonging to a Van Gogh society
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or a Bach society that proclaims this is the one true music or the one true art, I think that there's
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many ways to experience these spiritual feelings, the spiritual reverence, the spiritual opening up to life
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without connection to organized religion. So let's say someone's listening to this podcast and they're
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like, you know what, I want to experience more wonder in my life. I haven't had it since I was a
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kid. I'd like to feel it again. What can people do to facilitate wonder in their lives? Or is it
00:27:01.460
something that you can force? Or does it just have to happen naturally?
00:27:04.620
Yeah, I'm afraid that I probably I wish I had something that I could say this will for sure do
00:27:12.740
this. And you can't. The whole point of wonders, it is a surprise reaction. It is when we're
00:27:18.140
encountered with something. Again, I want to say something. Sometimes it happens while reading a
00:27:22.080
poem or just a passage in any book that it strikes us as so true that at that moment, we're wondering,
00:27:29.660
what is the source of truth? How is there truth that goes beyond my individual life? And then
00:27:35.120
we're curious about where truth comes from. That triggers wonder. We have it when we look into the
00:27:41.620
starry sky. We can look at it in the midst of a scientific activity and wondering where does
00:27:48.680
vitality in the universe come from? It comes, but it always has to come by surprise. And that's the one
00:27:54.940
way I don't think you can deliberately set about it. Okay. All right. That's I was hoping you'd have
00:27:59.660
something because I was really looking for some money. But it makes sense. Can I throw this out?
00:28:04.640
I was talking to someone who was reminding me of in the holiday season, they were out in a car and
00:28:11.520
they were driving and they realized they had a checklist with nine more things to do. And they
00:28:17.740
were going in their traffic jam and they were going this, how are they going to get everything's done?
00:28:21.340
And they knew they were, with the holidays arriving, they were missing something. And he said,
00:28:25.900
I know what it is I'm missing. I'm missing a sense of wonder. And they were all of a sudden flashed to
00:28:31.440
sitting in a church for a Christmas Eve service with candlelights and heralding that angels were now
00:28:37.980
coming into the sky to announce the birth of a savior. What could be more evoking of mystery,
00:28:45.220
evoking of wonder than a service like that? And I think that's what draws us to our religions is that
00:28:52.800
religion maybe isn't about the truth of their doctrines. They have varied, the doctrines have
00:28:59.360
changed religion to religion, century to century. But the one thing they do is religions at their best
00:29:06.360
evoke and hold us in this state of wonder. And I think it's what keeps bringing us back. The stories,
00:29:13.000
the rituals, the singing that all cherishes one of those rare human emotions that may be not giving
00:29:21.380
us immediate fight flight advantage opens us up to care for and want to connect and be a greater sense
00:29:28.860
of affinity with the wider universe. Well, Bob, this has been a great conversation. Where can people
00:29:33.360
learn more about your work? Well, I guess I did write the book called Wonder. It was by University of
00:29:40.120
North Carolina Press if they were to look for that. I teach at Bradley University. And if they go to
00:29:46.520
the Bradley University website and look for the philosophy and religious studies department,
00:29:51.560
my webpage could be found there. Well, fantastic. Bob, thanks so much for your time. It's been a
00:29:56.920
pleasure. Well, thank you. My guest today was Robert Fuller. He's the author of the book Wonder
00:30:01.800
from Emotion to Spirituality. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also check out our show
00:30:06.480
notes at aom.is slash wonder where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this
00:30:10.380
topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and
00:30:26.620
advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. Our show has been
00:30:30.340
recorded on clearcast.io. If you have a podcast and looking for a better way to record remote podcasts,
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check it out. Something I've been developing for the past year. As always, we appreciate your
00:30:38.060
support. Reviews on iTunes or Stitcher helps that a lot. Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling