ColumnSome people experience overwhelming awe in church, some on magnificent mountaintops, some in elegant equations. But some of us tend to get “it” when witnessing stunning examples of our human footprint. If that sounds like you, you just might be a humanist—something with very down-to-earth implications.  

“I was blown away.” The phrase is used so often it’s a wonder we’re all not aloft. “Awesome!” A term so ubiquitous, you might find yourself yearning for the run of the mill. Indeed, if every OMG! were an honest-to-god conjure of what’s holy, His/Her/Its omnipresence would be completely and finally undeniable.

Of course it’s easy to pick on our culture’s most overused overstatements. (OMG aside, the above are certainly part of my vocabulary). But if we dial down the hyperbole for a moment and honestly think about the things that make us dizzily reach for the nearest handrail, we’re likely to learn a lot about who we are and what makes us tick.

Consider that second glance, the super serious one, that says, “No, really! I was blown away!” This usually features earnest and pleading eye contact that begs you to believe and embrace the gravity of what the speaker is gushing about. The subtext: “I’ve experienced something beyond words.” (So to speak.)

For most of us, the varieties of religious experience are evidenced as many. (I use the term “religious” advisedly, requesting some latitude from my fellow nonbelievers.) We know this because, hopefully, we know a variety of people. I, for one, have dear and respected friends who have been knocked off their horses by the Judeo-Christian King of Kings, both with and without the help of his also-divine son. Other believers I know have experienced more creedless, less-moderated Big Moments with what they perceive to be supernatural forces. Alas, such supernatural events have never happened to me.

Others tend to have their wow episodes in or considering nature, sitting on a mountaintop, watching the ocean’s waves or simply staring up at the vastness of the cosmos on a starry night. These happenings reportedly include a number of overwhelming sensations (smallness, bigness, existence, nonexistence, self, non-self) and a feeling of oneness with the universe. For a range of folks, from Buddhists to Gaians to Newtonians, our natural world offers up awe like candy, if we only take the time to look, pay attention and feel.

Unlike being touched by the supernatural, these natural episodes have happened to me. It would be something if they didn’t, living as I do in Northern California where a four-hour radius from my front door offers up glories like Yosemite and the shores of the Pacific. Over my lifetime, too, I’ve had the great fortune of experiencing marvels ranging from the Arctic Circle to the Gobi Desert. I’d have to be pretty thickheaded not to have been occasionally swept away. I, too, can be floored by the awe and joy of being a part of the universe and it’s clockwork workings, whether known, yet to be known or forever unknown. Yet despite its power, nature, per se, is not my biggest mind blower.

To Each His Swoon

The name of this column, HyperKulture, refers to a psychosomatic phenomenon that presents “rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal significance, particularly viewing art.” In its debut, “In Swoon’s Way,” I wrote about a recent trip to Europe during which I had experienced a number of such events (healthily upright though I remained). Today, looking back at those moments and holding them up alongside similar events throughout my life, a pattern has emerged.

What sends my mind off its rails are the awesome things we humans do. (Yep. Awed. For real.) This goes back to what prompted my first swoon—Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon (though this is probably a swoon-after memory of a memory given the fact that I was only 5 when it happened). In fact, I remain blown away by that historic feat; just conjuring it in my mind for more than few moments can make me dizzy and if I really push it, even a little teary. I mean, the dude left the earth and walked on the moon. WTF?!

Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve had a number of these man-made experiences. Visiting Atelier Brancusi, listening to the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,” reading Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” enjoying a dinner once prepared for me by Chef Paul Prudhomme—all head-spinning. Even imagining indirect experiences—Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, MLK’s Dream, the idea of Amelia Earhart taking off into the ether—can totally spin me out when I give them more than just passing thought.

Don’t get me wrong. It takes a lot for someone or some deed to set me off—and sometimes it’s unpredictable. Why did that Caravaggio at the Met that one day spike my BP and send me running out to the street for air when all the other masterpieces I saw before it left me relatively unshaken? And what was it about that one time at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington? Why was that visit so different than all the other times I stood inside its colonnade? Who knows what kind of perfect brainstorm has to occur to rock my world?

In any case, to my religious friends: Some of your prophets. Holy shit! The idea that actual people have had that kind of impact on the world? That their ideas would hold such power and sway? Wow, man. It still baffles me that the Buddha came up with what he came up with. And to my science-focused friends, about those elegant equations that so turn you on? Given that the math is way above my pay grade, it’s the scientists themselves who suffered and slaved to arrive at such beautiful truths who ignite my wonder. Newton. Einstein. Hawking. When I think about what these people accomplished and the impact they’ve had on how we live every day—oh my!

Yep. For me it’s the humans. How about you? Have you been set asunder by Homo sapien heroics? World-renowned feats of wonder aside, are there people in your life who have done the unimaginably awesome? Your grandfather’s charity? Your mother’s unconditional love? Your aunt who lived gracefully with disease and died with strength and dignity? Maybe the person with whom you shared your first kiss? For those of us who have this mortal-creature-based swoon pattern, may I suggest that perhaps we have—heaven forbid!—an ism.

Us and (Just) Us

There’s no simple, all-purpose definition of humanism. Its many facets include historical, academic and philosophical angles dating back to well before the term came into use during the early Renaissance. But for these purposes, let’s use one that seems to be recurring and general enough to get the job done: “A system of thought that focuses on humans and their values, capacities and worth.”

Of course, there’s nothing in those words about the type of “religious” experiences I’m speaking of here. In fact, most definitions of the philosophy (or worldview or whatever you choose to call it) allude to it being distinctly rationalist and secular (big draws for me). But if we can agree with the idea that there are instances of experience in our lives that at least seem to be transcendental, then perhaps it’s okay to go ahead and give humanism its religiousy due.

Einstein here: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

The great scientist was speaking broadly and, of course, addressing rapture emanating from far beyond our actions on the ground. And let’s be clear: No one would go so far as to call humanism a religion. But for those of us who ascribe to this philosophy in its secular form, we can indeed point to our very own swoons and appreciate our awesomeness in what some might go so far as to describe as a spiritual way.

However you characterize the idea of humanist rapture, if you’re going to go ahead and claim the ism there are ramifications of such a throw-down—there is no doubt a yang for this yin. While most definitions of the philosophy speak to our ability (and even inclination) to make the world a better place, there is another side of the equation that speaks to something darker about our ability to achieve.

Yes, our capacity for evil is awesome too. While there are heroes who can truly make us swoon, just watch and listen and know about the bullies, as well. The beheaders, the fundamentalists, the reactionaries—know that the visceral shudder you get when you see their “achievements” is just rapture turned upside down. We humanists can’t offload the sublimely destructive on a less-than-benevolent god, the weather or the downside of an equation. If you’re anything like me, this dark side of our awesomeness can be as mind-blowing as the brilliant side. Oh, the humanity—and the voodoo that we do.

Scott Adelson is EcoSalon’s Senior Editor of HyperKulture, a column that explores opening cultural doors to initiate personal change. He is also the author of InPRINT, which reviews and discusses books, new and old. You can reach him at scott at adelson dot org and follow him @scottadelson on Twitter.

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HyperKulture: Living in the Past – You Can’t Go Back… Why Would You Want To?

HyperKulture: Making Space for Your Inner Homebody – A Case for the Great Indoors

HyperKulture: You May Ask Yourself, ‘How Did I Get Here?’ – The Pitfalls of Passion Drift

Images: Aldrin Apollo/Public Domain (top), Smithsonian Institution (middle), Footsteps on the sand from Shutterstock (bottom).

The post Do People Blow Your Mind? You Just Might Be a Humanist: HyperKulture appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnPressuring ourselves to “get out more” is an old hat we use to deal with our problems. Fresh air. Exercise. New experiences. It makes sense. But sometimes answers can be found by spending more time in our “place.” Here’s a case for respecting your inner homebody.

I’ve recently taken a few of those silly online quizzes that tell you who you are, what you were and where you should be. It’s a guilty distraction, I know, but it has importantly been determined that I’m Gustav Klimt, living in a minimalist Paris apartment during the Renaissance and playing lead guitar for Led Zeppelin. Fair enough. Count me in.

I mention this because among the many odd questions that helped these brilliant algorithms identify my true self, one popped up that got my attention: “Do you prefer to be inside [picture of some dark, ill-defined interior] or outside [a lovely mountain with a lovelier waterfall]?” I clicked “outside,” of course—but then paused, hit the back button and stared at the question again. Could I? Might I? Yes. I changed my answer to “inside.”

Allow me assuage some guilt out of the gate and say that I do love the outdoors. I’ve climbed some big mountains, hiked some excellent trails and believe Ra is the one true god. Also, with summer coming, I’m well aware that championing the indoors might not resonate very well with the promise of a much-needed vitamin D fix on the near horizon—particularly for my long-suffering friends back East. (Sorry, dudes. You’re welcome in Cali anytime.) Nevertheless, I think the great indoors—and staying home, in particular—gets a bad rap.

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with our personal home space—one that’s easy to take for granted. After all, it’s where we conduct such inspiring tasks as doing laundry, collapsing in front of the TV, going to the bathroom and eating hastily made eggs over the sink before rushing out to our “real” lives. Even those of us who take great care in tending to our insides, as it were, or choose to work at home (as I do), would be excused for gliding over its value and impact as familiarity indeed breeds oversight. You know, in plain sight, out of mind.

But next time you’re home (if you’re not all cozy now), take a moment to stop and look around, and pay some attention to your quarters. As the poet W.S. Merwin put it:

Just this, just this, this room where we are. Pay attention to that. Pay attention to who’s there, pay attention to what isn’t known there, pay attention to what is known there, pay attention to what everyone is thinking and feeling, what you’re doing there, and pay attention. Pay attention.

If you do, interesting things are sure to emerge. The colors you (and perhaps your roommate or partner) once chose to “open up the space.” How incoming light glints this way and that. What’s lying around? Magazines? Photos? Check out those books on the shelf. Which ones have you read? Which ones have you not? Why not? When was the last time you looked at that art on your wall? Remember when you got it? What was happening in your life then? Did you buy it overseas? Or at Pier One? What does that mean?

And here’s an ode to tchotchkes. I know they’re not everyone’s cup of tea (and dusting is a drag), but most of us have lots of them. From where I now sit, I see a curious combination of class (a lovely Baccarat glass statue of a Labrador retriever I stole from my parents) to kitsch (a Detroit Red Wings shot glass filled with Tootsie Roll Pops) to somewhere in between (a small ceramic sculpture of a head I made one day in college that somehow turned out way above my pay grade).

Though my space doesn’t give off the hoarder vibe, there are little things everywhere. They elicit memories of some of the many nouns in my life—the people, places and things—that at one time or another were important to me. All told, knickknacks are clues—curated breadcrumbs that can lead us back through our lives to experiences that may need re-exploring, analysis or just one more well-deserved smile.

Room to Create

Aside from stirring your memory pot, exploring your space can be a limitless source of creative and emotional inspiration, as well. At home you can have an interesting and productive conversation with yourself. One obvious example of how such space inspiration works is in the visual arts. Artists use the word studio—or “room for study”—to describe the place where they retreat to energize their thinking and do their work. Two quick examples:

A friend of mine, the artist Abigail Doan, spends a lot of time working with found objects. She says her home environment is “constantly evolving with the displayed objects that [she’s] currently researching or interpreting.” Her work with sculptural fiber forms and still life arrangements “often migrates from room to room in a dialogue with my children’s play activities as they, too, draw and create objects with materials that we collectively recycle in the home or find outdoors. There is a certain clarity that comes from making things work in the time and space that one has available.” By arranging, rearranging and juxtaposing items she’s gathered, Doan grows new concepts. This is a process that happens inside.

Also consider the game-changing Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). Without belaboring my fascination with his revolutionary work, the relevant short take is this: the artist is inexorably linked to his commitment (some say retreat after scandals related to public reception of his work) to his Paris workshop, which was also his home. He constantly photographed it and invited the world to come to him, rather than pushing his work “out.” And he was always rearranging his pieces so they would support and impact each other, often describing how the populated space itself was his expression. (Man Ray described visiting the studio as “penetrating into another world.”) After his death, he left his “Atelier Brancusi” to the French state with instructions that it be displayed exactly as it was the day he died. Painstakingly recreated just outside the Centre Pompidou, the great master’s magnificent “interior” is now available to all of us.

Of course, the broader idea of “studio” is not limited to the visual arts. The workspaces of all great thinkers and writers are, in fact, a source of great public fascination. (Note the recent online obsession with library and study “porn.”) In any case, allowing what’s happening inside your four walls to expand your thinking—rather than confine it—can be a wonderfully creative experience.

Room to Learn

For many of us, our very personal relationships with our inside space goes back to our childhood bedrooms. I remember when I was young getting a great buzz when I gave in to orders to clean my “calamity.” In fact, I came to enjoy it, right down to arranging the pencils and markers in my desk drawer. Better still was rearranging my furniture—moving the bed here, the desk there, changing out this poster for that one. Sometimes the new arrangements made sense. Sometimes I created ergonomic disaster areas. But still, I got a charge out of doing it. Somehow it made me feel smarter.

Today, I can be a tad OCD-ish. (I know, flip self-diagnosis bugs the hell out of me too, but you get my drift.) I have to neaten my home office before I begin to write and my studio before I put brush to canvas. I don’t have a clean fetish or germ phobia, but I do react well to organized clutter. It gives me the illusion that I have my shit together—that my thoughts are straight, that I somehow know what I’m doing. And I’ve read that, like all things behavioral, there’s some neuroscience to this.

One way of learning, especially when we’re young, is getting raw data in. New experiences. Fresh information. Soaking it all up like a sponge. But as we age, it’s about more than adding new bits. It’s about working with what we already have in stock. That is to say, by repositioning what we’ve already acquired into new relationships, we see new patterns—and we learn. Existential angstists might refer to this as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I say it’s part of the fun. Regardless, spending time rethinking can shake loose new ideas.

I know the idea of hermitage isn’t for everyone, and that’s perhaps too strong a word, anyway. But looking “inside” for new inspiration, using the found objects of our lives to grow and inspire and develop new tales with our existing vocabulary, so to speak, can open new doors in ways that simply opening the exit door can’t. By all means, get out and breathe the fresh air. Find new things and ideas. But don’t be afraid to take them home with you. You never know what you might come up with after you empty your pockets on the table, move things around a bit and realize that knowledge and growth are at hand.

Now if you’ll excuse me, the laundry is piling up.

Scott Adelson—who does indeed go outside—is EcoSalon’s Senior Editor of HyperKulture, a monthly column that explores opening cultural doors to initiate personal change. He is also the author of InPRINT, which reviews and discusses books, new and old. You can reach him at scott at adelson dot org and follow him @scottadelson on Twitter.

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Images: Allie_Caulfield (top): René Magritte, Les Valeurs Personnelles (Personal Values), 1952; Scott Adelson (center): Atelier Brancusi, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Abigail Doan: Fiber Form Drawing |2012 (Sofia), Abigail Doan, 2012.

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ColumnHave you ever intentionally engaged in a mind-bending, dizzying, life-changing cultural experience? Have you self-induced what we call hyperkulture? Consider the idea that you can purposefully step outside your comfort zone to shift your perspectives—and that time traveling is not required to put yourself in swoon’s way.

A sudden, icy sweat. A spinning sensation. The immediate need for a chair. It took more than a few minutes to regroup—perhaps because that necessary chair was nowhere to be found—but I had some experience with this feeling. The race back from 1564 to 2013 seemed to take longer that it actually did, but that’s understandable: Time traveling has a way of knocking you off your rails.

The venue for said swoon was Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon—in the actual bedroom where it’s said the great Bard made his grand entrance. As a writer and fan of his work (how could that not be an understatement?), a lot had conspired that afternoon to leave me leaning against a wall, struggling to take in air. What was initially an earnest, if touristy, moment was transformed by a blood-to-the-brain rush of understanding that this now-visualized birth so many centuries ago was critical to not only my choice of profession but to my intellectual and emotional vocabulary—this screaming (of course!) infant would eventually teach me how to think and inform who I am. And not only me. All of us. It’s Shakespeare, for god’s sake, born here—right here—and destined to change the trajectory of our culture. Yes. For this writer… some air, please.

I know Shakespeare isn’t everyone’s life-altering cup of tea, but I’m sure many of you are familiar with the phenomenon I experienced that day in England. We all have had interactions with discrete articulations of our human culture—in the realms of art, literature, travel, food, history, technology and media (or, in my case here, that bedroom)—that overwhelm us. These are personal growth moments and, I think, by definition positive. They are instances where we’re touched deeply, beyond the intellect, so that our soul spins and we can distinctly feel our emotional anatomy change. And these moments even have a name (a few names actually). To varying degrees, these states of mind are sometimes referred to as Stendhal or Florence syndrome—or Hyperkulturemia.

According to one medical dictionary, the syndrome is defined as “a psychosomatic response—tachycardia, vertigo, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations—when the ‘victim’ is exposed to particularly beautiful, or large amounts of, art in a single place—e.g., Florence (Italy), which has a high concentration of classic works; the response can also occur when a person is overwhelmed by breathtaking natural beauty.”

For this discussion, I think we can safely broaden the causes beyond art and nature to include other cultural encounters (read: that bedroom). I also think we can leave the veracity of the notion that this is a cap S-Syndrome to specialists above my medical pay grade. But in any case, regarding the times in my life when I have experienced such a state, the French author Stendhal was spot on in 1826 when he wrote about it in “Rome, Naples and Florence” (from a 1959 translation.):

Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intentions of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of the Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (the same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves); the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.

I don’t want to take lightly what some might call a severe mental-health event. (Hallucinations?) But I also want to be clear that these happenings are more than just “oh my!” moments—they are true swoons, in every sense of the word, save perhaps hitting the ground. (Thank you nearby chairs, walls, et al.)

Making It Happen Not long after returning to the U.S. late last year, as I looked back at my journey and Shakespeare reaction, something occurred to me. Up until then, this kind of thing had happened maybe once every few years since my late teens. Yet this trip had somehow produced five such episodes in just four months. Though I still consider these instances rare and unexpected, something was going on that triggered these experiences—or at least allowed them to take place.

Here’s some context: I had left California for extended travel overseas for the first time in years, making good on a promise to return to my globetrotting ways after Things 1 and 2 had left home for university. I made the trip with my girlfriend of eight years, Mihaela, and like my days traveling as a youth, had a fairly slipshod approach to time and money planning. We formulated the trip as we went, discovering along the way that my primary editorial client would be withholding payments in unpredictable, seemingly sadistic ways. Though punctuated by a few lovely moments of luxury, our journey—including time in Eastern and Western Europe—would feature some good ol’ down-and-out, cold-water-flat time, with me slamming away at my keyboard (she says I type like Jim Carrey answering prayers via email in “Bruce Almighty”) while she went out in search of cheap veggies to stew for dinner.

All of this is not to complain, by any means. The trip was glorious and brilliant and in almost constant high relief. But we for sure had left our relaxed Bay Area comfort zone and, back to our story’s syndrome of interest, this was a good thing. I firmly believe that being on our heels opened the door to the above-mentioned byproduct—and again, not once, but five times.

Aside from the Stratford-upon-Avon experience, it happened in Spain in the Plaza Mayor, where one evening I could not keep my hands from shaking when attempting to take a photograph. It happened in Florence while taking in Masaccio’s masterworks in Santa Maria del Carmine. And then twice in Paris (but of course)—once in the Pompidou in front of Joan Miró’s Bleu triptych and another time during the first of two visits to Atelier Brancusi. Then there was London, where I happened upon Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll temporarily on display at the British Library. I’ll spare the details of these events (each one a story), but suffice to say that I do not diminish my many experiences during these months by saying these five quite literally floored me, each in their own way changing the way I think.

For me, having done the math, there’s a great takeaway here. I think we can increase the chances of such life-changing cultural experiences—call it hyperkulture—occurring in our lives if we take risks. This is not to say that you need to go time traveling, or out on some financial edge or upend your life. Nor do you have to be in Florence—or Paris or London or even Kathmandu—to access those things that will push your personal envelope. But rather and more simply, if we purposefully and actively take ourselves outside our comfort zones, we’re more likely to have encounters that will shift our perspectives. It could be as easy as turning off your phone and getting lost in a museum. Or hiking into the forest with a tent but without a plan. However we wish to do it, to initiate personal change and growth, we can, in fact, put ourselves “in swoon’s way.”

Scott Adelson is EcoSalon’s Senior Editor of HyperKulture, a monthly column that explores opening cultural doors to initiate personal change. He is also the author of InPRINT, which reviews and discusses books, new and old. You can reach him at scott@adelson.org and follow him @scottadelson on Twitter.

Top image: Wikimedia Commons

Other images: Scott Adelson Related on EcoSalon:

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InPRINT: One the Road – Again: Revisiting Jack Kerouac

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