The Experience of Creative Awe

The experience of awe prompts a predictable series of psychological changes.
We become less reliant on preconceived notions and stereotypes.
We become more curious and open-minded.
And we become more willing to revise and update our mental “schemas”:
the templates we use to understand ourselves and the world.
The experience of awe has been called “a reset button” for the human brain.
But we can’t generate a feeling of awe, and its associated processes, all on our own;
we have to venture out into the world, and find something bigger than ourselves,
in order to experience this kind of internal change.

“In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean,” 

Henry Thoreau wrote in contemplating nature as a form of prayer — a clarifying force for the mind and a purifying force for the spirit, a lever for opening up the psyche’s civilization-contracted pinhole of concerns.

A generation later, in a different corner of Massachusetts, William James pioneered the study of attention with his then-radical (at least to the Western mind) declamation: 

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

James distinguished between two kinds of attention: “voluntary,” in which we willfully aim our focus at a particular object or activity with concerted effort, and “passive,” which approximates the Eastern notion of mindfulness — an effortless noticing of sensations and phenomena as they naturally arise within and around us, our focus drifting by its own accord from one stimulus to another as they emerge. 

James listed this “passivity” as one of the four qualities of mystical experiences. But it is also the most direct valve between the mystical and the mundane — the type of attention that places us in our most creative states.