Dr. Paul Pearsall - AWE: The Delights and Dangers of Our Eleventh Emotion

The first book to explore the enigmatic emotion of AWE, based on the only-known study of its connection to the meaning of life

Feeling suddenly elevated to the limits of indescribable delight, yet teetering on the edge of fear, we experience our rarest, most powerful, and least understood emotion: awe. Its an overwhelming and life-altering blend of fright and fascination that leaves us in a state of puzzled apprehension and appreciative perplexed wonder. If we go beyond a kind of ignorant distant voyeurism through which we gawk at life rather than fully engage with it and put in the effort to try to understand a little more about lifes meaning, awe becomes less a feeling of being high and more a feeling of deep immersion in any and all of lifes processes, including health, illness, love, and even death. It may not cause us to come to believe in something, but it can cause us to believe that there is something more beyond the grasp of our limited human consciousness. It can turn our stress into motivation for growth, solidify our commitment to our families as systems that can experience collective awe together, and help us find meaning, comprehensibility, and manageability at times of our most profound losses and even our own death.

--from Awe: The Delights and Dangers of Our Eleventh Emotion

Lyrical, eye-opening, and highly perceptive with unexpected twists and turns as grand as awe itself, Awe is an invitation to leave our states of languishing and to flourish; however, the choice is ultimately yours as to what to do with your eleventh emotion, its delights and dangers, and what you choose to make of it.