Dacher Keltner

Right, life.

But life, it's a law like pattern, it ends.

And I remember Oprah, when I started to talk publicly about the science before the book, I remember very clearly this, I was just asking this group like, when have you felt awe?

And this woman raises her hand and she said, I was holding my sister's hand.

as she had her last breath in life.

And I was awestruck by her place in my life, that things like this end, she continues like I felt with my brother, Rolf,

And so the life cycle is a very underappreciated, but reliable source of awe.

Yeah, and people feel awe about these big ideas, AI, quantum physics, evolution, et cetera.

And for me, the challenge of my brother's passing, not only concretely to live a life without my companion in awe, my brother,

was to understand what life means, which is it is a cycle for us physically.

And we all have to lose people.

Buddhism, the first noble truth is we grasp that suffering and things continue and they go onward and we grow and we learn.

And for me, I had to grasp

that we're not just cells and neurons and bodies that were more out of the experience.

And that, and I feel that to this day that, you know, I feel my brother's with me and that there's something beyond what I thought was all that there is to nature.

I even felt it when you were describing this gospel concert, I started to feel my body change and we've made a lot of progress in understanding that.

And what we know is a couple minutes of awe reduces physical pain, it reduces long COVID symptoms, it benefits your heart by activating what's called the vagus nerve, this big bundle of nerves in your chest that calms your body down, like you said.

it reduces inflammation in the body.

The immune system heats up your body to kill pathogens.

If you feel chronically threatened by poverty or racism or misogyny, your body will be heated up, inflamed.