Are minds made of wonder?

I'm beginning to suspect it's strangely plausible that awareness is something like wonder incarnate.

In her early 60s, my mother began fumbling her words a bit too often. Around Christmas of 2022, we all began to notice. Her sentences would stop short, and she’d look around, as if someone had swooped in and stolen the word she intended to use. Did anyone see where it went?

English is her second language. And she still seemed quick as ever with her French, though mine was broken enough that I couldn’t be sure. So maybe, we thought, she was fine. Just getting old.

A few months later, either by dumb luck or divine intervention, she slammed the side of her head on the corner of an opened kitchen cabinet so hard she vomited. My sister brought her to the hospital, where they confirmed that yes, she had a mild concussion. That’s when they noticed the tumor.

It was about 5.5cm, or the diameter of an average lemon. “Massive,” the doctor said. It was growing on the outside of her left frontal lobe, pushing down on a part of her brain that handles language processing.

To get that large, the tumor had likely been growing for years. Removing it should go well, the doctors said. But operating near that area of the brain could also further damage her language ability. Leaving it in wasn’t really an option, though, since it would just keep growing, guaranteeing further decline at an unknown rate. So off she went to surgery. We’d see how much language she’d recover afterwards.

Salvador Dalí’s “Cosmic Madonna”

…

They let us — my sister, father, partner, and myself — into her recovery room a few hours post-op. She looked terrible, like truly horrifyingly bad. But things went well, they told us. The tumor was benign. Her thick brown hair, not quite shoulder length, had been shaved from the left side of her head. Most of the newly carved border between hair and scalp was crusted over with dried blood. Tubes were protruding from all over the place. But the tumor was out, and there had been no big surprises. The doctor explained that over the next few hours, she’d slowly wake up as the anesthesia wore off, and her language should spring right back. Her compressed brain matter would do the same.

Except, she didn’t. Not really.

Her eyes would occasionally flutter open, and they’d flicker something like recognition when they caught us. But then they’d shut, and she’d sink back into oblivion. A few hours into that cycle, her lack of progress brought the doctor back in. His method for trying to induce wakefulness involved placing his hand on her sternum and aggressively shaking her side to side while yelling her name. “Celine! Celine!” he’d shout, as he rattled her back and forth, sort of like he was horizontally beating an egg.

In response, her eyes would shoot open, as if he’d shot adrenaline straight into her heart. She’d lurch forward, eyes blazing wide, back lifting from the bed exorcism-like. But then she’d sink back down, eyes closing, body going limp again.

This went on for hours. They thought maybe she had a stroke, and brought her back in for an MRI. But it looked clear. So we sat and waited.

…

Some time later, I don’t remember if it was the next day or late that night, she began to emerge. She’d keep her eyes open, and they’d emit that recognition. But no words, and not for lack of trying.

She’d look at you for a few moments, then she’d look upwards as if thinking, or looking for words, and then she’d drop her eyes back to you while trying to start what she must have wanted to be a sentence. But nothing would come out. Just a sort of ghostly silence. Someone had stolen her words again. She’d regroup, and literally go looking for the words again in the northern regions of her visual field. She’d come back, try to speak, and again — .

Her reaction to this whole ordeal of being absolutely cut off from any use of language will never leave me. After a few seconds of curving her open lips into the sort of contracted oval that might begin a sentence with some sort of “W” sound, as if she were trying to blow smoke rings but forgot to actually smoke first, she’d pull back in surprise, pinch her eyebrows in confusion, and look up at you as if you’d both just witnessed the strangest thing you’ve ever seen.

This went on for at least a day, the discovery of language’s absence and the subsequent astonishment. After a while, towards the end of the sequence where she’d return to bewildered eye contact with you, she began to smile at the whole thing in the way that you might if you’d both just seen one of the world’s rarest birds land briefly on your shoulder.

…

Finally, the looping sequence produced her first word. It came not while she was trying to speak, but afterwards, during the astonishment phase. I don’t remember which one of us she was looking at when it came, but she spoke clearly, with most of her usual intonations: “Unbelievable.”

This became the new sequence. Eye contact. Word search. Failed speaking attempt. Shocked reaction, now accompanied by the same word each time, “unbelievable.” And the word came in full emotiveness, as if she’d never in her life found anything as unbelievable as whatever she was referencing. Each syllable was emphasized.

Slowly, a few other words creeped back into her arsenal. “Wow.” “Gee.” “Weird!” Each came with the same palpable astonishment and fully intact Quebecois accent. It was like she was so thoroughly bamboozled that a language cluster around that sentiment had sputtered back online, and slowly, its perimeter expanded.

Her first phrase was so on-the-money that it felt like parody. If the universe is a simulation, surely the simulators were now fucking with me, I thought. “We don’t know,” she started saying, with a shrug and a small smile. “We don’t know.” In that grubby ICU recovery room, some profound mystery was apparently present.

Some time later, when we were able to feed her some hospital-grade applesauce, she’d pause between spoonfuls, softly shaking her head: “To know that you are eating is amazing.”

Apparently, to my mother, everything had been made wonderful. Even hospital food. The dull film of ordinariness that sets in over time was lifted, and her world seemed alive with the sort of bewildered delight I mostly associate with children, psychedelic trips, and that story of Zen master D.T. Suzuki having so much fun playing with a kitten that he forgot he was supposed to give a serious lecture to gathered attendees (it’s also possible, even likely, that he felt playfully coexisting with a kitten in view of others was more instructive than any lecture he could’ve given). The fact of her own experience dazzled her. We’re alive, can you believe it?

“We still and always want waking,” Annie Dillard writes in one of her books. “We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”

Yanking a lemon-sized tumor from my mother’s frontal lobe had apparently woken my mother up, who was now perpetually stunned while dawning a hospital gown. She could see the show — it was everywhere, everything. Maybe language usually gets in the way, and having a bit of a break helps us remember something that words and concepts and intellectualizing obscures. Maybe, with language set aside, some deeper current of mind, usually suppressed, can make its way up to the surface of experience. Maybe wonder isn’t something to be found, but unobstructed.

…

There’s a metaphysics for that

According to the 11th century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, that’s exactly, without any sort of poetic flourish or metaphor, what’s going on. In his view, as described in a recent book by religious studies professor Loriliai Biernacki, wonder is the expression, or unfolding, of an “essential subjectivity.” It points us “to a deeper awareness of self, before the mind jumps in and builds border walls, closing off and demarcating itself as self proper against that which is other.”

Abhinavagupta’s argument, which offers a flavor of panentheism, argues that wonder is not only the essence of mind, but of all matter. His view, which we don’t need to get stuck on, is that there’s a primordial consciousness that transcends the manifest world, Śiva, but the world is itself an expression of that primordial consciousness. “The category of Śiva unfolds the world out of itself and then savors this multiplicity in the experience of wonder,” as Biernacki puts it.

And most succinctly: “Wonder is the essence of matter…at base, what constitutes matter is just the state of wonder.”

Let’s put claims about the nature of the entire universe aside, and just dwell on the subsidiary idea that wonder is the essence of subjectivity. That’s a strange idea. Wonder feels like a complex thing you can build from simpler aspects of mind, not its fundamental stuff. How can a mind be made of wonder? And if the deep nature of subjectivity really is wonder, why can it be so elusive? Why do things like language seem to bury it?

But walking around with this strange idea, I keep finding little hints. Flavors of the idea strewn about the world. Just a few days ago, for example, one of Aella’s essays popped up on my feed: “When your mind relaxes, the floor beneath you is a solid base built out of delight.” Imagine that!

On my end, I’ve been romping around as a journalist across the contemplative sciences for the past few years, and it’s beginning to look, suspiciously, like the frontiers of the mind sciences are basically curving back around to Abhinavagupta’s idea.

In research on advanced meditation, psychedelics, and consciousness in general, we’re now getting a bunch of science that suggests minds clench and carve up experience in ways that obscure a whole range of mind-blowing qualities that rise up when given the chance. Turn the mind upside down and shake it a bit, and what falls it out is pretty surprising. It might not be all that outlandish to say that minds could actually be, to some literal degree, made of wonder.

…

Consider Metzinger’s meditators

Maybe basking in the aftermath of successful brain surgery on your left frontal lobe is one way to wake up to the mind’s baseline of wonder. At least for a bit. But meditators have been waking up for thousands of years, voluntarily, with no surgery or hospital-grade applesauce required, and trying to tell anyone who’ll listen all about it.

In fact, meditators have been evangelizing the wonder-full fruits of meditation for so long that I’ve grown pretty numb to it. Like sure, fine, I am ignorant as to the nature of my own mind, my awareness is hitched to a misleading sensation of “self,” and that unholy union is, in fact, the very source of suffering that my life’s actions are trying, in vain, to mitigate. Whatever.

But every now and then, someone repackages that basic contemplative spiel into a form that pierces my numbed exterior and actually gets through. One of the latest is German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who is both a long-term meditator and something of a mythical figure in the science and philosophy of consciousness.

He has a new book out — The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness — that reports on a 2020 survey of 3,500 meditators across 57 countries describing their experience of “pure consciousness.” And the thing is, these reports read eerily like my mother’s experience. It’s a huge book of experiential evidence that Abhinavagupta might have been on to something, and the basic, foundational quality of awareness itself could literally be something like wonder.

You can actually get the book for free straight from the publisher.

By “pure consciousness,” used interchangeably with “pure awareness,” he means the simplest possible form of conscious experience, or “Minimal Phenomenal Experience” (MPE). The idea is basically: how many features of consciousness can you strip away while leaving consciousness itself intact? What is the maximally deconstructed, most stripped-bare form of consciousness available to us? What is the essence of consciousness like?

In experiences of pure consciousness, these meditators report no sense of time or space; no autobiographical self-awareness; no agency; no first-person perspective at all, as in, there’s no feeling of ‘you’ at the center of your experience, but experience itself remains. And here’s how various respondents — each assigned a number — described MPE, that infinitely stretched canvas of awareness that remains after all the mind’s other habits have been deconstructed:

#3146: There was a quality of gentleness and wonder, and not in any words or concepts, but more as a pervasive feeling of “this is it, this is how everything truly is.”

#3524: “...sensationless awe, being deeply moved, all-pervading floaty thoughtless state of not searching further, being boundlessly held, fulfilled without needs.”

#3207: “Feelings were mainly love and amazement and gratitude.”

#2056: “Complete unburdening — a slight (almost “childlike”) feeling of joy…”

#2346: “There was a general sense of awe and joy.”

#35: “Pure awareness is the realization of having finally found home after an eternal search. The pathological searching, the agony of control, comes to an abrupt end, and for the first time you realize what it means to be alive.”

And so on. The point is this: apparently, when meditators sit still enough that the outer layers of the mind begin to fall away, leaving only the simplest, barest possible core of conscious experience, the variety that presumably undergirds all else, these meditators’ accounts really do suggest that what remains feels something like wonder.

So we’re up to two data points for Abhinavagupta’s strange claim that wonder is the essence of mind. My mom’s ordeal, and Metzinger’s meditators. Now, there’s the obvious next data point. Psychedelic drugs.

…

Psychedelia is a wonderland, too

One of the many unresolved questions in psychedelic science is why drugs can make just about anything appear like the most meaningful thing you’ve ever beheld. Take a load of mushrooms and sit facing the corner of a room with nothing but crunchy white paint in your visual field, and sure enough, you could probably turn away from that corner hours later with the conviction that you’ve discovered the great secret of existence. That wall will transform into the most wonderful thing in the world.

The leading theory of what psychedelics do to the mind is known as RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics — or the REBUS model, an acronym which requires serious elbow grease to derive from that name. It suggests that psychedelics relax the conceptual frameworks our minds use to construct experience.

When our minds use these conceptual frameworks as lenses to make sense of experience, it’s “top-down” processing. The mind is imposing its constructed view of the world upon experience. When psychedelics relax these frameworks, it allows for more “bottom-up” processing, the lower-level sensory processing that’s ordinarily crowded out of experience by the top-down framework.

And so apparently, when you relax all the ways that the mind tends to construct experience, and just let experience happen with less conceptual overlay, you get — among other things — an often shockingly wonderful, meaningful experience¹. Relaxed minds seem to spew meaning on whatever’s in perception. It doesn’t matter if it’s the drab corner of a room, tree bark, or the sky, which suggests that the wonder isn’t coming in from the outside, but is actually being projected onto perception from the reconfigured mind on the inside. Relax the mind, and wonder gets through.

…

Whatever the mind is made of can also be absolutely horrifying

Okay, but for credibility’s sake, let’s puncture this convenient narrative a little bit. Yes, there are meditators and psychedelic users and spontaneous mystics out there who will tell you that beneath the churn of ordinary minds is an inexhaustible wellspring of wonder.

But at the same time, there are others — including meditators and psychonauts — who will tell you that when they voyaged to the depths of the mind, what they found was downright horrifying. David Foster Wallace has a nice — which is to say, terrible — description in Infinite Jest of what can be just as true of dipping into “pure awareness” as what all of Metzinger’s meditator’s report:

“It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystic unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self.”

The more visible surfaces of meditation discourse usually paint a rosy rhetoric around how wonderful and existentially redeeming the depths of awareness are. But not always. There are also what Willoughy Britton once called “Dark Knights of the Soul” experiences, which sound like flavors of the above. Sometimes, meditation folk argue that these Dark Knight experiences, feelings of having encountered the ground of awareness and discovering that it is, in fact, “a nausea of the cells and soul” that’s “thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self,” is mixed up with all sorts of psychological confounders, mental illness, phases that can be worked through, or generally a not-yet-resolved-and-purified encounter with pure awareness.

But there are similar themes in the wider discourse on wonder and awe in general. Etymologically, the word “awe” reaches back about 800 years to the Middle English “ege” and Old Norse “agi.” Both, as psychologist Dacher Keltner points out in his recent popular science book, Awe, refer to shades of fear, dread, and terror.

In 2003, Keltner was working with psychologist Jonathan Haidt (the ‘smartphones are ruining us’ guy) to develop a definition of awe. They came up with: “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” And as Keltner adds, eight centuries ago, amidst plagues and famines and short life expectancies, “what was vast and mysterious was violence and death.”

Though Keltner goes on to cite evidence that awe’s emotional associations have shifted to the positive over the years, there’s still an undercurrent of terror (to put a number on it — a yet-to-be-published study of his looking at daily diary entries from respondents across 26 countries finds that about 75% of awe experiences were associated with positive emotions, leaving about a quarter for the underbelly).

In Rudolf Otto’s 1917 book, The Idea of the Holy, he describes encounters with the deepest sense of awe, a sense of the “numinous,” or “mysterium tremendum,” as both fascinating and terrifying. “We generally take 'holy' as meaning ' completely good,” he writes. “But this common usage of the term is inaccurate.”

According to Otto, the feeling of the numinous, mysterium tremendum, is basically all over the place:

“It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

Casper David Friedrich’s Monk by the sea, painted 1808-10.

Journalist Michael Pollan, in his 2018 book on psychedelics, recounts his trip on 5-MeO-DMT, which has the reputation of being the strongest psychedelic around, in that it just wipes your mind out entirely while leaving you — well, not “you,” but some canvas of infinitely stretched awareness that is at once both everything and nothing — somehow present through the whole affair:

“In the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation. Only afterward did I wonder if this is what the mystics call the mysterium tremendum—the blinding unendurable mystery (whether of God or some other Ultimate or Absolute) before which humans tremble in awe.”

In the hospital, for all the wonder my mother had awoken to, there was also terror. Sometimes, often in early in the morning, groping helplessly for words led her eyes to swell with something more like a terrible sadness. As she cried silently, her body screamed.

Probably, those moments had a fair bit to do with the more particular fear that maybe she’d never be able to speak again, rather than some intrinsic, trembling horror spewing from her newfound contact with a layer of awareness beneath, or before, words. But even if so, that tells us something about pure awareness. It’s no place to live².

If the teeming and multiplicitous world of dualities we all encounter each other in is just a play of emanations from some primordial and undifferentiated consciousness, Śiva, then it still seems that we like to inhabit this partitioned world together, chattering, rather than dissolve back into Śiva, alone and mute³.

…

What do we do about wonder

My mother, by the way, has made a full recovery. She’s spritely and linguistically able as ever. Her hair has grown back to cover her scar. She has some strange, hazy memories. We talk about the whole ordeal as an episode now quickly fading into the past, wonder and all.

Describing this essay to my partner, she found the whole thing kind of silly. “I feel that way all the time, what’s the big deal?”

To return to Dillard, “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery,” and while I’m still trying to find my bearings, I’d like my form of life to at least “choir the proper praise.” Drawing wonder into awareness is, for me, both a remembrance and celebration that doesn’t always come easy. It’s work, a kind of sadhana.

But if it comes easier to some than others, then the existence of that spectrum implies the ability to move along it, which could be an interesting aspect of the conversation around what “progress” or “flourishing” mean. Back in the late 1800s, economist Henry George looked around at the rapid transformations of society brought on by industrial technologies, and said that you might have expected all that progress blazing about to make “the poorest labourer’s life a holiday, in which every high quality and noble impulse could have scope to grow.” He imagined even “the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars⁴.”

I do not think that the living conditions of today’s poorest laborers are conducive to drinking in the glory of the stars, and would love to see “progress studies” work on that (abundance is great, but alone, I don’t think it’ll do the trick⁵).

Metzinger wants his research to help us develop a ‘culture of consciousness,’ one that “values and cultivates the mental states of its members in an ethical and evidence-based way.” But already, secular culture has embraced a certain scientific flavor of wonder. Wonder has become “the go-to consolation prize for our loss of some greater power in the universe, a soul, a god,” Biernacki writes.

In a disenchanted, atheist, Newtonian universe (or even a multiverse, which is now even a common Hollywood trope), “wonder ferries us into the giddy high of transcendence, but still manages…to stop short of the certainty of faith. Historically, transcendence has been the provenance of religion. Wonder offers transcendence without the religious strings attached.”

Which leaves us receptive to precisely that: a mode of wonder that enchants us while disenchanting the universe; that evokes transcendence without challenging positivism; that praises science while trivializing religion; that externalizes wonder as something to be found out there, staring into the twinkling night or marveling at the intricacies of nature’s web, rather than a quality embedded in the deepest layer of what we already are, everywhere and always.

If awareness is wonder incarnate, the positivist worldview where science is over-extended into a reductive kind of scientism buckles. Which is to say, if wonder serves as the spiritual praxis for modern society, the way we think about it matters. It shapes our world.

Metzinger, for his part, helped orchestrate a $20,000 prize for the best contribution to building a testable scientific model of pure awareness. And maybe the jhana buzz, or work on using ultrasound stimulation to accelerate meditative progress, will bring more people into the fold of investigating the old-fashioned way, sitting lotus-like while deconstructing the mind.

So maybe, if we can hold open our minds long enough, a new flood of data will arrive to help us puzzle through the nature of the mind. Or maybe, we — the variably rigid cognitive schemas that conjure that feeling of you, and I, and us as separate creatures — are forever stuck tracing language on the surface of impenetrable mystery. In flashes of wonder, the self and its reflection in the world might still join as one. The conceptual schemas that pry us apart crack, and for a moment, there’s only everything.

But then, we snap back up to the surface. Maybe it’s for the best. Because where the mystery is resolved, we do not exist. And where’s the fun in that?

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1. When I noted how interesting it is that the ground of awareness seems to be full of these exceedingly excellent qualities, meditation teacher Tucker Peck pointed out that this is a very old topic. Asking why does pure consciousness feel so wonderful and meaningful is basically the secular way of asking: Why does God love us?”

2. Meditation teachers often say something like ‘the point of practice is to ultimately discover that these two realms are not in fact two realms, but one in the same.’ Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. And that eventually, you can train your mind to realize this holy union, such that living and talking and acting in the world of form is no different than basking in the undifferentiated stew of awareness. For now, I can neither confirm nor deny.

3. I think there’s more to this, but I digress.

4. This selection of HG quotes comes from Marilynne Robinson’s more recent piece, Is Poverty Necessary, which is so good that I will gladly email you a PDF if you want to read and don’t have a Harper’s subscription.

5. Abundance — of housing, medical coverage, good jobs, clean energy — is all well and good, and could materially improve the life of the poor. But if you think abundance alone will do the trick, it might be worth giving Henry George a read, whose argument that progress and poverty are structurally hitched, such that no deluge of abundance will wipe away poverty and scarcity unless we first reconfigure the laws and policies that determine the underlying ownership of assets, remains an important one. His idea, a land value tax, is still a good one. But we could also start with, like, facilitating sectoral bargaining in the US.