Are you ready for a post about God? Uh oh, he said the G-word. If the mere mention of that term makes you want to stop reading, this post is for you. Rest assured, there will be no proselytizing. I won’t come knocking on your door in a spiffy suit asking if you’ve heard the good word.

 We’re embarking on an exploration into the roots of human belief, that realm entrenched in the history of all cultures that speaks volumes about our connection to the world around us. 

The Birth of Belief

Throughout history, many individuals - thinkers and zealots alike - have sought different expressions for the concept of “God”: the Tao, fate, fortune, nature, the Absolute, Anima Mundi, Great Spirit, the universe. If the “G-word” unsettles you, it’s likely due to the conduct of those who have wielded it in objectionable ways. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in today’s world stoked about the inquisition, witch hunts, and the suppression of scientific progress. But let’s not mistake the map for the landscape, the word for the thing itself.

Why did humans around the world conceive the concept of a divine force? How can we define said force? The two questions are closely intertwined as the latter informs the former. 

Consider your prehistoric, cave-dwelling ancestors, navigating an untamed land. Witness a sky illuminated by a meteor shower, landscapes set ablaze by lightning, a mountain exploding into a molten inferno, or the moon eclipsing the sun, plunging the day into night. What would they make of these phenomena whose comprehension is out of reach for another few millennia?

In the hearth of the undefined, the concept of gods was forged. By ascribing the inexplicable to the divine, we draw it slightly closer. We satisfy our insatiable thirst for comprehension. In this linguistic leap of substituting divinity for the unknown, we make the inexplicable explicable, the unfathomable fathomable, perhaps even comforting.

Example: The Maasai, who once attributed headaches during their ascent of Kilimanjaro to evil spirits, can now counteract altitude sickness with medicine, no longer fearing animist retribution for scaling a mountain.

Science vs the Sacred

But let’s pause and take a step back. What do the aforementioned natural phenomena elicit within us to kick off the God-fabricating process? Bewilderment, smallness, fear, reverence, amazement, perhaps even a hint of acceptance. This bone penetrating emotion known as awe is what Dacher Keltner defines in his book ‘Awe’ as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

With the enlightenment lifting us out of the dark ages and the scientific revolution peeling away the veneer of the unknowable, societies (particularly wealthy educated ones with access to these scientific insights) have turned secular. This movement away from religion inspired Friedrich Nietzsche to write as early as 1891, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” Is Freddy right in his assessment? Does knowledge diminish the divine? What are the implications for our sense of awe?

Science has elucidated much of the darkness that once awed us. Many people never confront the unknown until death comes knocking. We now must venture to the beginning of time or the depths of a black hole to find the frontier of the unexplainable. In this desert of awe we call the modern world, is it a mere coincidence that depression rates (in the West) are at an all-time high?

The Extraordinary Ordinary

So what’s the solution? Surely not a regression to the dark ages or pulling the emergency brake on our quest to understand the universe we inhabit. The real issue lies not with the concept of God, but with us. We cannot allow the sacred to slip away while we idly sit and watch. We must give chase.

Keltner lists the eight wonders of life where we can find awe: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany. While these are the most accessible avenues to awe, they are far from the only ones.

Our quest for novelty has blinded us to the magic of the mundane. We only give ourselves permission to feel awe in uncommon settings and situations like when we visit a national park or welcome a child. But this need not be the case. Why shouldn’t the commonplace spark wonder as well? Instead of seeking awe only in the extraordinary, we can cultivate our sensitivity to it in order to detect it everywhere.

Let’s explore how some of the world’s diverse religions supported this notion. The Gospel of Thomas relays Jesus’ words, “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.'" In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna, "I am the taste of water, the light of the sun and the moon, the syllable Om in the Vedic mantras; I am the sound in ether and ability in man." Lao Tzu writes in the Tao Te Ching, "Tao is great in all things, complete in all, universal in all, whole in all.” The Quran states, “Wherever you turn, there is the Face of Allah. Indeed, Allah is all-Encompassing and Knowing."

The flavor of a peach, the song of a bird, the wrinkled hands of a grandparent, even the act of breathing – all the product of the universe’s birth 13.8 billion years ago. In each there is stardust, the symphony of elements, the miracle of life.

Cultivating the Awe Sense

We can reorient ourselves to awe. This is why the Stoics practiced Memento Mori. Death needed to be remembered because it is so easy to forget. And its awe-inspiring remembrance infuses the rest of life – even the quotidian - with meaning.

 In Zermatt, Switzerland, wooden lounge chairs along the river face the Matterhorn. Locals and visitors alike sit for hours in wonder at the majesty of the storied mountain. This is but one way a city can foster awe. We have the power to rekindle this diminishing flame within us, to see the grand in the granular, to recalibrate our values with our deeper nature.

Through mindfulness, we rediscover the divine. We nurture an awareness of awe, our sensitivity to wonder, finding it in the grandiose and the mundane alike. Freed from the structures of organized religion, we may each forge a personal spirituality, crafting our unique bond with the world. We just have to pay attention and give ourselves permission to wonder.