Awe, With And Without The Gods

“In an influential 2003 paper, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt argued that awe is characterized by two central features: vastness and accommodation. Vastness describes the experience of something larger than the self, whether that vastness is a matter of physical size or of metaphorical size, such as great power. Accommodation refers to the need to modify one’s current mental structures to make sense of the experience — whether or not such modification is actually enacted or succeeds.”