Since peony stems are lithe and supple, the cut could only have been made with a sword, and only a very determined stroke would have made so clean a slice. No ordinary person could have done it.
– The Peony
First, awe involves perceptual vastness, which refers to the sense that one has encountered something immense in size, number, scope, complexity, ability, or social bearing (e.g., fame, authority).
– Inspired to Create: Awe Enhances Openness to Learning and the Desire for Experiential Creation
Masters hide in plain sight and only those with eyes to see would be invited for tea. Sekishusai was a master of Shingake-ryu and in the late 16th century, he went into seclusion to perfect his art. At this time, there were many pugilists who wanted to make their mark and they regularly challenged Sekishusai to fights.
One of these was Denshichiro. He and his companions travelled to Yagyu where Sekishusai was staying. There, after being refused once, they pressed their luck again, writing in a letter that “they didn’t want to leave without seeing the dojo”. They went as far as saying, they wanted to “come tomorrow” because they wanted to “pay their respects”.
Sekishusai had more important things to deal with and really did not want to spend precious time on those who did not appreciate the grandeur and awesomeness of an art form. In his view, such people “usually have a high opinion of themselves; moreover, they’re prone to try and twist things to their own advantage”.
When one of his warriors volunteered to take on Denshichiro to rid his master of the unnecessary intrusion, Sekishusai replied, “If you were to beat him, you can depend on it that he’d try to destroy our reputation in Kyoto”.
Preferring a gentler approach, Sekishusai “quickly wrote a simple letter, of the sort a tea master might compose and handed it … with a peony” to Otsu, a lady who played the flute in his mountain house, for delivery.
Denshichiro was very upset when he read the reply and he returned the peony to Otsu. When she suggested he keep it, he “lowered his eyes as though insulted” and looking sour, replied, “You can tell him we have peonies of our own in Kyoto!”
By a serendipitous twist of events, the peony ends up in another room of the inn where Denshichiro was staying. This time, the rejected gift seizes the attention of another swordsman whose “casual interest became intent scrutiny”.
It turned out the ordinary looking flower was not in the least ordinary. Naturally, Otsu reported what had transpired with Denshichiro and Sekishusai was proven right in his assessment of the challenger.
Access imbues us with a false sense of possibilities. Researchers from Microsoft found by studying electronic messages, that we, “are linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances to Madonna, the Dalai Lama and the Queen” (Smith, 2008). With increasing connectivity, it is now possible to get the attention of just about anyone in the world without intermediaries.
For example, shareholders are invited to Annual General Meetings to engage management on issues. In such meetings, anyone who asks a question would be treated respectfully. This of course is to demonstrate an openness to views and that the invitation to participate is genuine.
Responses to coming face to face with superior ability or achievement could according to Schurtz et al who wrote, Exploring the social aspects of goose bumps and their role in awe and envy, give rise to two different emotions.
Some would respond with awe and others with envy. Schurtz and others (2011) suggest that both have an “adaptive function”. Awe is a “pleasant experience” “which occurs when people witness something grand, sublime, or extremely powerful – such as a natural wonder, a perceived experience of the divine, or an extraordinary human action” (Schurtz et al., 2011).
In contrast, envy has been described as the “unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of inferiority, hostility, and resentment produced by an awareness of another person or group of persons who enjoy a desired possession (object, social position, attribute or quality of being” (Smith & Kim, 2007 as cited in Schurtz et al., 2011).
The authors were studying goosebumps which have been associated with cold and fear. They wanted to know whether envy or awe resulted in goosebumps. In their tests, they asked subjects to recall a memory when they “felt an intense sense of awe or envy because of another person’s superior power, talent, ability or behaviour” and then to report if they felt goosebumps.
They found subjects felt envy because of “invidious social comparison” due to a “noticeable, sometimes extraordinary feature in a social object”. They cited Freud who suggested that people tend to compare themselves with those who have minor differences to themselves (and so necessarily largely similar to themselves). Freud added that when the differences are too large, people do not bother with comparisons.
With increased access, it is not inconceivable that some might question the right of some to take the stage while they themselves are seated among the audience. Access gives the impression of likeness and enables comparisons which quite often are meaningless and invidious. X looks like me and I can understand what X is saying. Is X really superior?
Importantly, they found that goosebumps in “humans may be less associated with submission to threatening higher-ranking members of one’s group and, instead serve as a marker of an intense, but accepting, upward social comparison emotion, unalloyed with fear or submissiveness”.
It is entirely possible to experience pleasant feelings instead of fear which according to Yoda, “leads to the dark side” (Walker, 2017) when in the presence of greatness. When given a choice between appreciation and invidious comparison, why would anyone choose the latter, especially when it is unpleasant, painful and not based on an accurate understanding of the larger scheme of things?
Respect, awe and appreciation have evolutionary purposes. Awe leads to humility which is necessary for learning and inventions. Wyn Wachhorst is an educator and science writer. In The Case for Wonder: A Meditation (2015), he wrote, “A true sense of wonder ignites an open quest for knowledge” and that this wonder is “a curiosity rooted in true humility”.
Man began with awe of nature and some of his kind worshipped nature. Then he began to study nature systematically and publish scientific explanations on its inner workings. “As new inventions such as microscopes and telescopes opened up previously unknown worlds, scientists were able to peer in on the minutiae of life and gaze into infinity” (Wulf, 2012) and it was thought that the heavens could be measured. Now “comets were no longer viewed as portents of God’s wrath but” as “predictable celestial occurrences” (Wulf, 2012).
Wachhorst’s science writing has won several prizes such as, the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for best essay of the year and includes bestselling books such as, The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity. One would think that someone like him would not indulge in fantasy but be the very paragon of scientific rigour.
Yet he attributes his achievements in Science to listening, reading and watching fantasy when he was a young boy. He recalls his uncle who told him stories of “canals on Mars” which could have been “built by an older, wiser civilisation heroically trying to delay extinction” and that this was “a wondrous image, a fire in a small boy’s mind” (Schneider, 2005).
The other luminary who laments the loss of a childlike wonder is Jane Goodall who said she found the description of photosynthesis in her son’s biology textbook to be “the kind of stuff that would have totally disenchanted me from the wonder of plants”. She recalls wistfully the description of the same process by Julius Robert Mayor who in the 1800s had written, “Nature … had solved the problem of how to catch in flight light streaming to the Earth and to store this most elusive of all powers in rigid form”.
She was one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2019 for her environmental work and groundbreaking scientific discoveries. She too attributes her achievements to a sense of wonder which she developed while spending time in nature as a young girl.
Isaac Newton in 1687 said, “Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power … I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena” (Sfetcu, 2019).
Students have unprecedented access now to information. Like in the 18th century which is considered the “Age of Enlightenment” and which saw “a move towards science and rational thought” (Bellis, 2019) there is now again a sense of empowerment to take control of nature. Then, like now, there was “widespread replacement of manual labour by new inventions and machinery” and “increased availability of printed materials”.
This bullishness could be tempered with a healthy dose of humility and respect. Overconfidence leads to black swans. Taleb who released, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable in 2007 appears to have been prescient. He warns against Enlightenment type thinking with its overconfidence on rationalising (Panagiotarakou, 2013) and says modern science’s achievements pale in comparison to that of civilisational achievements (Hochschild, 2019). Indeed, Taleb advises that the wisdom of grandmothers is more reliable than that of modern science because of the Lindy effect – things which have lasted a long time would continue to endure (Smith, 2018).
In Discussion on Making All Things Equal, Ziqi of South Wall says, “… day and night replacing each other before us and no one knows where they spout from. Let it be! Let it be! [It is enough that] morning and evening we have them, and they are the means by which we live”.
Indeed, the sun is peerless. As one drinks in its wondrous beauty, one cannot help but wonder how its unmistakable and unstoppable brilliance shines through even dense clouds.
The Brain Dojo
