Let’s look for a moment at conventional scientific research studies before delving into a Depth psychology approach.

A 2013 study by authors Laura Reinerman-Jones, et al. showed that “experiencers of awe and wonder showed differences in theta and beta activity throughout the brain compared to non-experiencers.”

Author Helen De Cruz (2020) determined that “awe and wonder play a crucial role in scientific discovery. They focus our attention on the natural world, encourage open-mindedness, diminish the self (particularly feelings of self-importance), help to accord value to the objects that are being studied, and provide a mode of understanding in the absence of full knowledge.”

Awe tends to be constructed as a feeling or an emotion. For example, Dachner Keltner defines awe as the “feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding” and Kirk Schneider wrote that “awe has long been regarded as a ‘life-changing’ emotion that helps people persevere through adversity.”

Authors Elena Bondi, et al. (2025) showed that “awe seemed to be involved in the reduction of rumination and self-referential thinking which are factors characterizing mood disorders, such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)” and reported that there is “new evidence on how multiple brain areas can work together to produce the powerful, mysterious, transformative awe emotion.”

Jinwoo Lee, et al. (2025) point to the “self-distancing” dimension of awe correlated to its ambivalence. They speculate in the following manner:

One possible interpretation is that the meaning-making process inherent to awe – particularly facilitated by self-distancing – may be reflected in the heightened cortical distinctiveness of ambivalent feelings. Indeed, self-distancing has been identified as a core cognitive appraisal that integrates conflicting affects to generate unique meaning across diverse contexts, including daily emotional experiences, art appreciation, and resilience from adversity. Through self-distancing, the coexisting positive and negative feelings elicited by the perceived vastness and need for accommodation inherent to awe would converge into a distinct affective feeling that cannot be reduced to a sum of positive and negative feelings (i.e., exhibiting qualitatively distinct neural representations).

Our speculation that self-distancing bridges the cortical distinctiveness of ambivalent feelings with subjective experience of awe can be extended into a hypothesis about how awe results in two distinct self-related implications: self-diminishment and self-transcendence.

However, Yaden, et al. concede that “recent perspectives have proposed viewing awe as an altered state of consciousness rather than as an emotion or feeling.”

If we are to adopt an Analytical Psychology lens, I consider awe to glow at the threshold between ego and Self; it can be called self-transcendent. Rabbi and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel said:

“What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe”
(2001)

Awe starts with keen curiosity, or else ravishes us unexpectedly, thus taking the ego off guard. Although awe is often associated to being a response to a sublime object, it reverberates of its own at the instant of contact between so-called “subject” and “object.”

Jungian analyst Erich Neumann (1961) wrote:

The numinous content possesses a fascination, a richness beyond the power of consciousness to apprehend and organize, a charge of energy surpassing consciousness. Hence the encounter with it always leads to an upheaval of the total personality and not only of consciousness. In every confrontation of the ego with the numinous, a situation arises in which the ego gets ‘beside itself,’ it falls or is wrenched out of its shell of consciousness and comes back to itself only in changed form.

Awe in small children refreshes the adult who has too often lost touch with it, or it beckons her to be reborn in the Now to love unconditionally in the present moment. It is free from knowing in a cognitive sense, from the arrogance of the intellect. It does not doubt and it does not compare.

Awe is like drinking spring water at the source for the first time ever. Because awe does not know, it is closer to an all-knowing source, which is beyond the egoic. It is at the beginning and at the end, the alpha and the omega.

Carl Jung (as cited in Ryan, 2002) wrote:

I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism…. Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. (CW 4, para. 331)

It is in a constant state of evolution and not fixed. The ego is threatened by awe, because awe challenges the sense of self-importance of the ego, its acquisition of knowledge, even if experiential. Awe reveals in a glimpse to the ego, “you are nothing” — tabula rasa. It reveals Being the way a diaphragm in a camera takes light, without which the mechanism is useless. It has been called a “self-diminishing” emotion, but in the moment of realization of the Self which brings ego diminution, the experiencer is freed to experience wholeness, the transcendent Self “porous” to the universal unconscious. Author Alice Chirico (2023) commented:

“If experiences of profound transformation have a core moment, that can be awe.”

Similarly, in Pathways into the Jungian World (1999), Robert Romanyshyn speaks of being “awe struck by the fecundity of the world, by its glorious ripeness and outpouring generosity” (p. 40) and further as being “struck dumb, and silence is often the norm” (p. 42).

Awe is quintessentially a receptive state, archetypally feminine in nature. Sublime art and sublime nature are thought by author Robert Clewis (2018) to be “transcendent” and “perceived or imagined in a new light, in a rare moment.” But awe is not perception limited by the experience of the sublime nature of an object of perception. I posit that awe is a unique arising between the transcendent self of the phenomenological experiencer and the “object” (a construct). The object is not the stimulus for the experience of awe as a response, although it may contribute to it. Conversely, the experiencer is not the creator of her experience. It is a unique symbiotic relationship in a given moment bathing into the totality of what is — name it “Universal unconscious,” “Mind-at-large,” or “Consciousness.”

Awe cannot be claimed as an achievement; it is fleeting in nature, which makes it intangible.

It can be called an angel, which means messenger of divine essence or Self. It demands total surrender in a split second, as orgasms do. It is a kind of orgasm with the numinous. It is, arguably, more accessible to those who are not yet in the grip of the ego, young children, or to those who have lost a grip on the ego, the elderly.

Awe opens us till it reaches the tenderest layers of our being; hardened layers and surface paint jobs crack and peel off for an instant. It graces us with a micro ego dissolution (hence Erich Neumann’s quote).

It is its own medicine, free and natural, unmarketable, a nonprofit but for the experiencer. It is a form of embodied activism against capitalism. Its only cost is a moment of surrender.

The robot may fake it, but it is not capable of it, because the robot cannot experience more than itself beyond its imitative functions of sensing, feeling, and cogitating.

Awe is the grace and privilege of a human being that intuits its rebirth through entelechies following the coming apart of its particles. Awe is a petite mort and a rebirth into instantaneous expanded being. In Close to the Bone, Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen wrote:

“Humans can have numinous experiences, a distinction we have as a species. Numinous has to do with awe, after which we know something we cannot learn through our intellect. It’s about divinity, the holy, a glimpse of divine beauty or love, something perceived that is beyond what the ego can grasp.”

References

Bondi, E., Carbone, F., Pizzolante, M., Schiena, G., Ferro, A., Mazzocut-Mis, M., … & Maggioni, E. (2025). Integrating virtual reality, electroencephalography, and transcranial magnetic stimulation to study the neural correlates of awe experiences: The SUBRAIN protocol. PLOS ONE, 20(4), e0302762.

Brooke, R. (Ed.). (1999). Pathways into the Jungian world: Phenomenology and analytical psychology. Psychology Press.

Chirico, A. (2023). Awe. In The Palgrave encyclopedia of the possible (pp. 168–176). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Clewis, R. R. (2019). Towards a theory of the sublime and aesthetic awe. The sublime reader, 340–54.

De Cruz, H. (2020). Awe and wonder in scientific practice: Implications for the relationship between science and religion. In M. Fuller, D. Evers, A. Runehov, K. W. Sæther, & B. Michollet (Eds.), Issues in science and theology: Nature – and beyond (Vol. 5). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31182-7_13

Hendricks, P. S. (2018). Awe: A putative mechanism underlying the effects of classic psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. International Review of Psychiatry, 30(4), 331–342.

Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The transformative power of everyday wonder. Random House.

Lee, J., Han, D. D., Oh, S. Y., & Cha, J. (2025). Awe is characterized as an ambivalent affect in the human behavior and cortex. Communications Psychology, 3(1), 123.

Lopes, S., Lima, M., & Silva, K. (2020). Nature can get it out of your mind: The rumination reducing effects of contact with nature and the mediating role of awe and mood. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 71, 101489.

Schneider, K. J. (2009). Awakening to awe: Personal stories of profound transformation. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Reinerman-Jones, L., Sollins, B., Gallagher, S., & Janz, B. (2013). Neurophenomenology: An integrated approach to exploring awe and wonder. South African Journal of Philosophy, 32(4), 295–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/02580136.2013.867397

Ryan, R. E. (2002). Shamanism and the psychology of CG Jung: The great circle.

Tarani, E. (2017). Affective and cognitive effects of awe in predicting hopelessness and brooding rumination (Master’s thesis, San Jose State University).

Van Elk, M., Arciniegas Gomez, M. A., Van der Zwaag, W., Van Schie, H. T., & Sauter, D. (2019). The neural correlates of the awe experience: Reduced default mode network activity during feelings of awe. Human Brain Mapping, 40(12), 3561–3574.

Yaden, D. B., Kaufman, S. B., Hyde, E., Chirico, A., Gaggioli, A., Zhang, J. W., & Keltner, D. (2019). The development of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S): A multifactorial measure for a complex emotion. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 14(4), 474–488.