I listened to a fascinating audiobook last year that wove some things together in my mind that my body already held together without my brain understanding quite why. In spite of it’s click bait subtitle, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life by the Berkeley cognitive behavioral researcher Dacher Keltner is a moving experience of a switch being flipped on in a place where you didn’t know to reach.
Keltner describes what psychologists who study brain functions call “the default self.” This is the thing in our embodied minds that turns off during the experience of awe. It is the sense of the individuated “I” or the self as an enclosed and separate thing apart from others.
“This self, one of many that makes up who you are, is focused on how you are distinct from others, independent, in control, and oriented toward competitive advantage. It has been amplified by the rise of individualism and materialism, and no doubt was less prominent during other time periods (e.g., in Indigenous cultures thousands of years ago). Today, this default self keeps you on track in achieving your goals and urges you to rise in the ranks in the world, all essential to your survival and thriving. When our default self reigns too strongly, though, and we are too focused on ourselves, anxiety, rumination, depression, and self-criticism can overtake us. An overactive default self can undermine the collaborative efforts and goodwill of our communities. Many of today’s social ills arise out of an overactive default self, augmented by self-obsessed digital technologies. Awe, it would seem, quiets this urgent voice of the default self.”
Awe is the experience of dropping out of that sensibility where our self-consciousness melts away and we literally “forget ourselves” in the midst of the experience. This amounts to a brain science description of what a mystical experience physiologically is. Which is why this cognitive researcher sounds almost verbatim like the 13-14th century German theologian and mystic Meister Ekhart.
Ekhart taught a spiritual path in which one who seeks God must first “take leave of yourself,” “depart from yourself,” “renounce yourself” such that the “will is perfect when it has no selfhood and when it has gone out of itself” into God.1 In one of his Talks of Instruction, Ekhart teaches his students, “Truly, if someone were to go out of what is theirs entirely, then they would be so enfolded in God that no creature could touch them without touching God first, and whatever came to them, would first have to pass through God on the way to them and would thus take on the taste and colour of God.”2 He seemed to understand the cognitive science intuitively, knowing from practice that we find ourselves whole when we no longer seek to be whole on our own but recognize that our self was always immersed in the Creator in and through whom we wake up to our oneness with all creation. “Strengthened by his body,” the mystic says, “your body too will be renewed. For we should be transformed into him and wholly united with him so that what is his becomes ours and all that is ours is his, our heart one heart with his and our body one body with his.”3
What’s amazing about awe is how this emotion—and the brain activity it reflects—can be traced across so many domains of human experience. It’s why the emotional memory in my body I recall from my first time on the top of a 14,000 foot mountain in the San Juans of Southwestern Colorado shares so much in common with my somatic memory of being swept along in the flow of bodies during my first protest march in the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement where we took over streets in Fresno, California.
Keltner believe’s that the happy life is the exact opposite of the individualistic dream of self-sufficiency American culture has promoted for so long. Which likely has a lot to do with why so many of us don’t feel happy. We’ve bought into a cultural myth that’s self-sabotaging. There are reams of scientific literature that prove as much. So Keltner encourages his readers to go in search of awe. Whether that is in meditation or walking through an old growth forest or taking collective action for justice.
In the Christian tradition we often talk about this through the language of transcendence—of coming into contact with the transcendent. The early church used language like theosis to describe this merging of the self into the self of God. Mystics like Ekhart always retained this vision of union or merging of the self with God, this becoming one with a body far vaster and more mysterious than our own, in which our differentiation is preserved but now merged and entagled in caring, soladaristic communion with others. The philosopher Charles Taylor called it the search for “fullness.” That human longing became something of an existential crisis and obsession for secular modernity as the hegemony of Christian culture splintered during the Reformation, Enlightenment, colonial opening of other worlds, and capitalist fragmentations and alienations of life.
We all know we have this longing within us to belong to something greater. We all know that when we can get out of our own heads for a moment—whether that’s getting lost in the story of an engrossing movie, or swept up in the dancing chords of a symphonic number, or leaping in synchrony with a mass of bodies at a club—we experience freedom. Our default selves are overwhelming. Our true selves are never singular. They come when we find our consciousness wrapped up in the consciousness of the cosmos.
I knew I wanted to reflect on everything I’ve said so far before the eclipse even happened. I took a run up the lake shore where we were staying in northern Maine an hour before the eclipse was going to happen and, as it so often goes when my brain gets some space to actually process things, wound up recording a voice memo with the outline of what’s written above. This is a little writer’s secret I guess: we are often premeditating how to make meaning of something we want to write about before we have even experienced it. This isn’t so much duplicative, at least I hope not, as it is a way of figuring out why something matters to you on the approach to it. The key, for me, is not foreclosing the possibility that the direct experience itself opens up something that was wholly unanticipated. You must still allow reality to reveal herself in her own integrity. So at the end of my voice memo, I trailed off in reflection.
“But I also don’t know what it’s going to be like. Perhaps all this changes when I pass through the portal…”
What I did not anticipate, as the world turned to brass and shots of rippling light flew across the frozen waters at my feet and the universe threw itself across the sky as dusk draped the horizon and that great black orb haloed in vast waving arms of silken white roared in eternal silence, was that as my default self dissolved into the ether I would find myself suspended in the revelation of Black Light.
Eclipse and apocalypse share their etymology for good reason. Not for the assumption of smug moderns who look down on the unscientific myths of anyone who would think a perfectly normal astronomical event portends the end of the world. Rather an eclipse is an apocalypse because, in the hiding of the sun, it becomes a revealing. An apokálypsis is an unveiling, literally meaning “to pull the lid off.”
An eclipse, I now know, is a Black-lit revelation of other worlds.
When darkness swept in, two pinpricks of light emerged. You can see them in the picture at the top of this newsletter. To the upper left was Jupiter while to the lower right we witnessed Venus. In the black light of the eclipse these lights testified to the finite contingency of this world. They prophesied worlds that are “otherwise” from this world, ways of being marked by different histories, and the capacity of our own small pinprick in the dark to be otherwise as well.
In that unveiling I grasped the edges of something J. Kameron Carter spoke of in his latest work The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song.
“I used to think that blackness is apocalyptic, that it signals something of an unveiling or revealing of alternatives in the midst of catastrophe, amid ruin. I actually still think that, but I also now think that it’s deeper than that. Blackness, indeed, is apocalypse, it is a blackalyptic unveiling. But this is a peculiar unveiling in that blackness is also an eclipse, a receding. Blackness, including the blackness of black religion, is apoc-eclipse. Blackness constitutes practices that constantly renew and revise themselves, a materially fugitive, an infinite, even transfinite, withdrawal, matter’s fugitive refusal of capture.”4
How does blackness effect all this? Because…
“in an eclipse darkness becomes visible in the sun’s fugitive disappearance that makes a sudden blank in the day. Eclipse exposes black light.”5
Carter points to Denise Ferreira de Silva for an expansion on what black light exposes and so will I. Let’s go back to her latest book I’ve quoted from a lot here over the past couple of months, Unpayable Debt. For de Silva, blacklight is what gets shined onto colonial-modernity by “the wounded captive body in the scene of subjection”—that is, a black (female) body bound and violated in white supremacy’s plantation landscapes.
“[She] performs the task that blackness alone can, which is to re/de/compose the post-Enlightenment onto-epistemological intrastructure and political architecture by exposing how the former works within the latter to support the arrangement of the Colonial, the Racial, the Juridical (the State and Cisheteropatriarchy), and Capital at work in the global present.”6
Instead of simply reflecting and mirroring the ideas and actions of whiteness (perhaps as with the light of a full moon, to play with an inverse of the eclipse metaphor), the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation “shatters the mirror” revealing whiteness and the world it has built as structures of “authorized violence.”7 Her black light is both a “refusal” of that world and the opening of an imagination for new ways of being where radiant Black life can be free in order that all life may be free. She prophecies an end (apocalypse) and the possibility of new beginnings (resurrection).
These are challenging philosophers to comprehend. But, then again, so are all the mysteries revealed through spiritual encounter. Here is what I know. Blackness—the Blackness Black people built, not the blackness Europeans made brick by violent brick for their own enrichment—has always marked an apocalyptic revelation upon worlds built for whiteness. And within the awe of the Black light of that eclipse, it seemed like so much more than just my default self could slip away.
So I find myself in the dusky dark of another morning forming myself into a mystic prayer, mouthing a refracted echo of Frantz Fanon’s decolonial groan, “Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions!”
Oh Creator of the luminous darkness through which you hiddenly shine, make of me a man who attends to all I am able of that which Black light unveils, enfold me in yourself and the universe Black light has long revealed, and join me in that communion of struggle toward other worlds where we can all be free.
Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, 6 and 16.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 34. But seriously, what doctrine of private property can stand up to this if it’s taken seriously? Good spiritual theology is socially radical so long as it isn’t dissolved into a/anti-materialist gnosticism. Anyways, I’ll stop indulging myself in Ekhart quotes and get on with this essay ;>)
J. Kameron Carter, The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song, 78.
Ibid, 84. Carter’s total argument is much too complex to get into fully and I certainly don’t comprehend all of it. But further on in this same paragraph, in following the work of Charles Long, he unpacks more of the etymological associations between eclipse and apocalypse: “sharing the same Greek root (-leipsis), ellipse, eclipse, and ellipsis are of a poetic pience in the theorization of blackness or, in Long’s work specifically, in the theorization of the blackness of black religion.” A couple pages on he says, cryptically, “Ellipse-eclipse-ellipsis. Ellipsis through an eclipse becomes illustrative of the ellipse” (88). Re-reading this, I found myself looking again at the arrangement of those three lights in the sky—Jupiter, the moon-blackened sun in total eclipse, and Venus—and found myself shaken. Here before me the eclipse formed an eliptical ellipsis (…) across the sky.
de Silva, Unpayable Debt, 28.
Ibid., 152.
An elliptical ellipsis! What?! Love it.
Thank you for this reflection, and for the photos too: the event wasn't visible where I was, but I felt both the negating and the revealing, and will be sitting with it all for a while.