Discover AWE Daily with Oprah and Dacher Keltner

0:00I love how you begin the book, your introduction. This is funny to me. You said, I have taught happiness to hundreds of thousands of thousands of people around the world. It's not obvious why I ended up doing this work. I've been a pretty wound up anxious person for significant chunks of my life. And I love this. And was thrown out of my first meditation class for laughing while we chanted, I am a being of purple fire. When I read that, I was like, what kind of meditation class was that? I'm a being of purple fire? Yep, my best friend memo and I got tossed out of that class in college. Yeah, you know, and that's the point.

0:37You know, I struggle to meditate. I am wound up. I can't, that's just what I got, you know, in my nervous system. And awe, really, as I wrote this book in a very hard time in my life, I was like, yeah, that's what grounded me in life. Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Oprah Podcast. I'm so pleased, honored, actually, that you chose to spend time with us here, where my intention is to offer some inspiration. and maybe a bit of breathing space from the hustle of your day or from the endless barrage of news hitting your timeline. I hope you all are watching that, being careful about that, because it can just be too much.

1:20But I'm excited for you to hear from my guest today because he spent decades studying, searching, researching for the secret to this question. How can we live a good life? Yeah, that's really what we all are in search of, right? How can we live a good life? And he says the answer is really simple and something any one of us can access at any time and anywhere, no matter your background, no matter your circumstances. His name is Dacher Keltner, and he's a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the host of the award-winning podcast, The Science of Happiness. I didn't even know there was such a podcast until researching for this.

2:04And I just recently read his bestselling book, Awe, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Now, I read it and thought, this man is speaking my language and that's why he's now here in the tea house. Dacher Keltner, hello. Hello, Oprah. It's nice to be with you. Nice to be here. And an honor. Thank you. When you first started on this path, I think you found there wasn't even a real definition of awe. So what is awe? Let's start with letting everybody know what we're actually talking about. Yeah, that's actually a tough question, right? People have been trying to define the sense of the mystical and the sublime.

2:43Yeah. And the word awesome is thrown around as a slang. A little too much these days. Yes, yes. Yeah. So awe is an emotion you feel when you encounter vast things, most typically, giant redwoods, right? A vast piece of music, somebody who really inspires you with the size of their character. And then it's mysterious to you. You don't quite understand it immediately and it provokes you to wonder. So very simply, awe is when we encounter vast mysteries. Awe and wonder, the same thing? No, philosophers pull awe and wonder apart. Awe is an emotion you feel. I see an incredible tree or a sunset. And then wonder is the cognitive state after by which I try to make sense of things, right?

3:28Right. One of my favorite examples is Newton and Descartes were these famous scientists and philosophers, and they were awestruck by rainbows. How do rainbows exist? And then in a state of wonder, they figured it out. They did math and color theory and figured out how when light bends through water, it produces a rainbow. Ah, so awe and wonder, obviously, are not the same. Wonder is what comes after the awe moment. Right. Okay. And tell us why, as you do in the book, but most people who are listening to us now probably haven't read. So tell us why it matters. Well, when you look at our world, Oprah, and you see the crises of mind, you know, depression and anxiety at historic highs, body, a lot of people are suffering pain and community.

4:20You know, our Surgeon General, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whom you know well, the crisis of loneliness. Loneliness. A minute of all day helps us with those crises. It makes you feel less depressed and more happy. It helps your body physically. And even if you experience awe by yourself with music or nature, you feel connected to community. And so when I started to look at these scientific findings and thinking about our crises, our shared crises, I was like, you know, there's almost nothing better than a couple of minutes of awe a day. Yes, and nothing is better also than shared awe, which you call - Collective effervescence.

5:02Collective effervescence. And a lot of people who are listening and watching us right now, you all have experienced this. Yeah. You know, I remember having a gospel brunch here on the lawn many years ago. And I had Gladys Knight and Dionne Warwick and Mariah Carey and all of them were here. And someone was passing the mic and literally everybody in the audience, all of us were in collective effervescence. We had never seen anything like it or experienced anything like it. And it was like the spirit came in to each of them and then entered us. It was spectacular. But lots of people experience this in sports, sporting events.

5:44Yeah. Concerts. Yeah. I remember just recently this past year, I went to see Gypsy with Audra McDonald. Uh-huh. And that performance of hers was, I could start weeping now, was out of body. Yeah. Was an out of body experience. And so was Nicole in Sunset Boulevard. Yeah. Out of body. So you were just amazed that a human being can do that. I was like, I literally afterwards wrote both of them a letter saying to see somebody vibrating at their highest level possible. You just know that it doesn't get any higher than that. Yeah. Brings awe to you. It does. And it's just remarkable. and I love your descriptions of it, Oprah.

6:31I mean, music's a classic example, gospel music. Yes. As good as any, right? And it astounds me and it speaks to how ready we are to experience awe, which is you can go hear music that means a lot to you. And within a millisecond, you are having goosebumps, you're tearing up, you're synchronizing with other people and it is an out of body experience. You leave the self and become part of this collective and you're hugging each other and crying and proposing camping trips. That's the collective effervescence you talked about. Well, in awe, one of the things, the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life, one of the things you did was you asked over 2 ,000 people from all over the world, different faiths, different backgrounds, different life situations, different educations, and you asked them, what is an experience of awe that you've had when you encountered a vast mystery that transcends your world.

7:28I'm asking that of you all now. For you, it was, I mean, what most people wouldn't consider an awesome moment, but for you, it was the death of your younger brother. Yeah. Can you tell us that story? Yeah, you know, I was lucky to be raised by parents who really cultivated a sense of wonder. You know, Rachel Carson, the great environmentalist, teach your child to wonder. and I had a younger brother, Rolf, who was a companion in awe. And we grew up listening to music in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon and wandering the foothills of the Sierras. And we did all of the awe-inspiring things in life together.

8:12And when he passed away first, it was pure grief and panic and anxiety. And the moment of his passing was awe-inspiring. It was, you know, seeing something transcendent about something there in his spirit, seeing the space around him as he was leaving, reveal new dimensions out there. I'm a scientist. You know, I didn't know what to make of this. I had no religious background. And then the big question, which is how is he going to stay with me? And through grief, I heard his voice. I felt his hand on my back. He was saying things to me. And he changed how I look at the universe. that there are other dimensions that we don't understand, that beings who leave us can be with us forever and that there's a cycle to life.

9:03And that's one of the wonders of life is the extraordinary miracle of life is its beginning, its growth and its ending and that it repeats itself. That's just a law of the universe. It was the first time I understood that when I had to see my brother die. Yeah. Yeah. And you said that after your brother's death that you lost your ability for a while to experience awe. Yeah. Why? From the grief? Yeah. I mean, grief - You just shut down? Yeah. Grief is panic and breathlessness and waking up at all hours and grasping for who was gone. My brother and I shared a narrative about life. I couldn't hear his voice that I heard all the time.

9:44And it was strange, Oprah. Here I was studying this emotion, giving it to people, and I just couldn't feel it. So how did you get it back? I very intentionally said, you know, I'm going to go in search of the wonders of life. I'm going to find some moral beauty. I'm going to be out in nature. I'm going to listen to music that I don't understand, like classical music. Or I'm going to think about the big ideas that matter to me. And so it took a while, but it changed my life. And so I like the idea of people understanding that there is awe in the everyday. Yeah. So are you one of those people who, as a scientist, you've written the book, and then do you actually practice it?

10:28Yes. Do you find awe in your everyday? Yeah. You know, I think one of the most important findings from our research is people think awe is mysterious. It takes a lot of money. You got to travel somewhere to find it. And that's just not true around the world. People feel awe a few times a week. and in those stories we gathered from 26 countries, it was right around them. You know, and Einstein said, awe is a basic state of the mind that we can access anytime. And so I make it a practice to find awe on a daily basis. After a quick break, we'll be back with psychology professor and researcher Decker Keltner, who will share the eight everyday experiences that can inspire awe in all of us.

11:19Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast. Dacher Keltner shares the number one experience that is most likely to inspire awe. This one might surprise you. You say there are eight experiences that inspire people to feel awe. You call them, actually, the eight wonders in life. People may be surprised to learn what the most common reason for awe is. I know y 'all are gonna be surprised by this. Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is, you know. I'm not, cause I experienced it every day, 25 years of doing a show and seeing it happen. Yeah, you have a career that cultivates moral beauty. And when we got these stories rolling in from Indonesia and China and Mexico and other countries, the most common source and most universal is what we call moral beauty, which is when you are moved by the courage and kindness sense of justice and humility of other people.

12:16And it is, you know, people start writing about, oh yeah, my grandmother or my teacher, you know, often teachers, this nurse who helped me with pain, my mother, my father, et cetera. And the stories are astonishing, you know, of encountering a fellow human, stands up to injustice or gives away some resources or is courageous facing. I remember watching the news and seeing a young, burly black guy standing out in the middle of water. And this was either a flood in Houston or a flood in Dallas. I can't remember which flood it was. But he'd been out there all day just, you know, handing down sandbags.

12:56And I remember him, you know, looking exhausted but exuberant. Yeah. And him saying, this is what Texans do. This is what Texans do. and my eyes watered when I saw it because I just thought, wow, you know, he's tired. He's got his own family, but he's out there. And this is what Texans do. So seeing someone do something extraordinary for somebody else. I remember years ago, there was a Maxwell House coffee commercial around Christmas time. And there was an elderly lady and the young woman next door goes and takes a Christmas tree and they put the ornaments on the Christmas tree together and then have a cup of Maxwell House coffee.

13:38And at the end of it, I'm like, oh. That's commercial moral beauty, right? Yeah, but the idea of sharing what you have with someone who doesn't. It is, but it's just remarkable to me that you can see a stranger helping another person in the streets. You don't know any of these people and you're tearing up. You can hear a story from another country about the courage of a woman facing a disease and it can change your life, right? And that is a mystery for me scientifically. Why is it that that's so powerful? But it definitely is the universal source of all. So that is the number one. It is. Wonder of life is people experiencing other people doing extraordinary, awesome things.

14:21Right. Yes. And you call that moral beauty. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. And because it evokes this feeling, like you said, of tearing up and it's almost like you're hearing a phenomenal piece of music. Humans seem beautiful. They seem transcendent, right? They're not part of the mundane world anymore. So it has this beauty quality to it that we've been interested in for a long time. So what are the other seven? We talked about number two, which is collective effervescence, right? That's everybody in the football game and your team and feeling that. Yeah, or the gospel concert. Or the gospel concert or wherever, the collective effervescence.

15:00Yes. And the third is nature. Yeah. Let's talk about that. I mean, you know, the science is a great place to begin. People know nature is awesome, you know, from oceans to clouds to redwood trees to flowers to spring to the sounds of birds. And the science is astonishing, which is that we're now learning that we are wired to be inspired and moved by nature. You know, if I hear running water, it activates parts of my heart, right? that calm me down. If I hear birdsong, parts of the brain light up that feel rewarding. If I smell certain scents, like the trees around here, that activates specific chemical processes in your brain that make you feel part of something larger, the ecosystem.

15:49Yeah. And isn't that the whole idea of every awesome experience is that it takes you out of your ego self and allows you to feel that you are a part of something bigger than your small self. And that took us 10 years to figure out and you just put it in one sentence. So thanks a lot. But, you know, it, yeah, time and time again, we started to realize that moments of awe in nature, moral beauty, music, et cetera, that nagging voice of the ego quiets down. Your to-do list and your sense of status and what, it just quiets down. In fact, the brain regions of the ego quiet down. Right. And importantly, what you said, which is you become more aware of how you're connected to larger things than you, be it a musical tradition, gospel music, a social cause, the environment around you, the gardens.

16:44That's really what's going on. That is what's going on. Even in that collective effervescence, what you're really feeling is that you are a part of something that's bigger than you. Yeah. Yeah. And it's profound. And it's profound. And needed. The fourth is music. Yep. We talked about that. Fifth is visual design. I thought that was interesting. Like great architecture or paintings. Yeah, I mean, you think about the, you know, the Islamic tile patterns or the Mesoamerican basket weaving and sculptures and temples and our minds are wired to detect these sacred geometries of the visual world. Even though we don't even know that's what we're detecting.

17:26Yeah. You know, but you feel struck by the facade of a cathedral or some painting. I was lucky to be raised by a painter, my dad, who got me looking at paintings early in life and they changed my life. And so, yeah, the visual world is a very rich realm of awe to explore. And then spiritual or religious experiences. Yeah. And it's important because in this complicated time in American history, spirit and religion can divide. And in some sense, as William James argued, underlying that is this feeling of the divine or mystical experience. 81 % of Americans feel a sense of the divine. Half of those people find it in nature.

18:10and awe is the emotion that tracks that relationship to spirit and the divine. One of the many sort of transcendent emotions like ecstasy. Stories also of life and death, number seven. Yeah. Tell us about that. Yeah. You know, we started getting stories around the world watching children be born, infants be born, grandmothers, parents, friends, relatives.

18:38You you could now think about, you know, why are people awestruck by spring, right? Because it's this maximum moment of life in nature. It's like everything is blooming. Boasting and blooming, yes, coming forth. Right, life. Yeah. But life, it's a law-like pattern. It ends. And I remember, Oprah, when I started to talk publicly about the science before the book, I remember very clearly this, I was just asking this group, like, when have you felt awe? And this woman raises her hand and she said, I was holding my sister's hand as she had her last breath in life. And I was awestruck by her place in my life that things like this end, she continues like I felt with my brother, Rolf.

19:23And so the life cycle is a very underappreciated but reliable source of all. Well, also that brings us to number eight, which is epiphanies or suddenly understanding the essential truths about life. Yeah. Which is what happened to you also with your brother in that space, right? When he was dying. Yeah. It, you know, and people feel awe about these big ideas, you know, AI, quantum physics, you know, evolution, et cetera. And for me, the challenge of my brother's passing, not only concretely to live a life without my companion in awe, my brother, was to understand what life means, you know, which is, it is a cycle for us physically.

20:12And we all have to lose people. You know, Buddhism, the first noble truth is we grasp that suffering and things continue and they go onward and we grow and we learn. And for me, I had to grasp that we're not just cells and neurons and bodies that were more out of the experience. And I feel that to this day. I feel my brother's with me and that there's something beyond what I thought was all that there is to nature. This has to be physically good, actually physically good for us too. I mean, I would think your blood pressure goes down, all the other things in your body that need to mellow out and chill.

20:58Yeah. When you're experiencing, if you've had an awesome moment or an awe-filled moment, that it would change your neurosystem. I even felt it when you were describing this gospel concert. I started to feel my body change. And we've made a lot of progress in understanding that. And what we know, you know, is a couple minutes of awe reduces physical pain. It reduces long COVID symptoms. It benefits your heart by activating what's called the vagus nerve, this big bundle of nerves in your chest that calms your body down, like you said. It reduces inflammation in the body. The immune system heats up your body to kill pathogens.

21:43If you feel chronically threatened by poverty or racism or misogyny, your body will be heated up, inflamed. It's a very troubling condition for your health. Awe cools down that system. I mean, it's amazing. And so it makes me bullish in promoting this to medical doctors. And how is it different than gratitude? Because I've had a gratitude practice for decades now where I do five things. I have volumes of gratitude journals. I'm constantly always, even when I'm just walking around, you know, my property here in a state of gratitude, appreciation, reverence. Yeah. But awe is something different.

22:27It is. And we call these the self-transcendent emotions where you get out of the self and really appreciate what's around you. Reverence, like you said. Yeah. Very much love that word. Gratitude is really not as mysterious as awe. Yeah. And it's really about more concrete things in your world. Yeah, that you appreciate. Right, that you appreciate. Awe is fundamentally about something vast that you don't understand. it's mysterious. So, I mean, after reading your book, Awe, I was thinking differently about, you know, my everyday experiences. And one of the experiences that I've shared with you all here before that I still love, and I still think it's an awe.

23:07Is this an awe moment or is this a gratitude moment? What is it? That moment where you're on the plane, you probably experienced it because you couldn't get in at first because of fog. There's that moment that no matter how rainy, dreary, miserable it is, you shoot through the clouds and you're up above the clouds. and you're looking down through the clouds. I am in awe every time that happens. I'm just like, how am I up here? And that's awe, right? That's awe. Suddenly you're like, this is vast. This is vast. I used to be on the earth and now I'm in space. Yeah, and now I'm here. Yeah, and it's, how did this happen?

23:42How do planes work? And it's so beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and that's just a classic experience of awe, which is you suddenly encounter something vast and you can't, your ordinary mind, if you will, you know, just making sense of our daily lives can't make sense of it. And I feel that about flying too, just, you know, appreciating the earth from 30 ,000 feet. Yeah. And I have one of my, I've had 21 dogs and now Sadie is about to, she's gonna turn 17. And the other day we were walking her and she has trouble getting down the stairs sometimes, right? So now I carry her down the stairs.

24:22And then we were out in the yard and she just started cantering, like running. And I stood there. I think I was in awe. Like, how is she doing that when you can't walk down the stairs? Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you know, it's almost like moral beauty, right? Which is we marvel at the exceptional qualities of other life forms around us. Yeah. And so you're sensing something, a spirit in her, a transcendent spirit. Yeah, that something came over her and she just decided, I'm going to run across this yard. Aw. Yeah. When we come back from this short break, Decker Keltner says, awe has the potential to heal social, cultural, and political divisions.

25:06We are back with Professor Decker Keltner talking about his bestselling book, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. You talked about in awe, you talked about these fractious times. I mean, politically, socially, culturally. How do you think awe, or if it can, be a bridge to help heal divisions? Is that possible? Yeah, I do. I mean, you know, I'm always worried about structural things, racism, misogyny, inequality. But I do feel that the, and we have empirical data for this, that feelings of awe socially make you appreciate your shared humanity. And they make you aware of the bigger thing that you're part of, right?

26:04And our study found that people on opposite sides of the issues of police brutality and abortion, once they felt awe, they didn't demonize or dehumanize their opponents. right? They saw the humanity in them. And, you know, Oprah, when you think about there are sources of awe that unite people in this country. 330 million people go to the national parks. It is unlike anything. And they are - Really? They're environmentalists, they're radicals, they're hunters, they're, you know, sports people, and it unites them in a sense of common spirit. So it's worth remembering the big sources of awe that bring us together.

26:50The Constitution is awe-inspiring as a document. I didn't know that 300 million people were into the national parks. Yeah, and you can go for$20. It's anybody goes. There's a program for fourth grade kids to go put together by John Jarvis, the former director of the parks. So it's a unifying American experience And it transcends our concerns in the moment about, you know, taxation or immigrants or the like. So there are things that we can cultivate. So our culture, as you know, is obsessed with this whole idea of ranking who's best and when, when and how and, you know, who's number one and who's not.

27:28So the question is, how can schools, how can families, how can communities make space for awe for children growing up in an achievement driven, achievement oriented environment? Yeah. I mean, I worry about this a lot. And having raised two daughters and teach young people up at Berkeley and see the effects of our times, 90 percent rise in anxiety in young people. 90 % rise. Yeah, it's epidemic. And so what the science of awe tells us is get them off the junk of their devices. And there's a lot of moral ugginess. We know that, we know that, yeah. Let them wander, give them more spare time. And then, you know, let them do the things that we deprioritize of music and visual arts.

28:22And the ones that I really like, Oprah, that I think we've de-emphasized are moral beauty, you know, get them to reflect on the people who move them. And then, you know, I think every child should be thinking about the big ideas they care about. And our educational system has kind of, I see this in our colleges. We don't think about like, what's the singular thing you wanna be part of, you know, that you learn from in history? Is it justice? Is it ameliorating suffering or what have you? And so I think we've got to return to these old ways that we used to find meaning. How would you advise those of us who are looking for more awe in our life?

29:09What is an awe practice? Well, one of my favorites we tested, which is the awe walk. The awe walk. And this is with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco. ago, we tested it with people over the age of 75 where they're feeling a little more anxious and painful. And once a week, you go out, a lot of people are walking in the United States and you look for awe. You look for natural awe, right? You go do your walk at sunset or you go to a stand of trees. You look for moral beauty. You may go visit, walk past a park, right? Where the kids are playing and all the wonders of play. So all you have to do if you're looking for awe is build it into your daily routines.