Promise me,
promise me this day,
promise me now,
while the sun is overhead
exactly at the zenith,
promise me:

Even as they
strike you down
with a mountain of hatred and violence;
even as they step on you and crush you
like a worm,
even as they dismember and disembowel you,
remember, brother,
remember:
man is not our enemy.

The only thing worthy of you is compassion—invincible, limitless, unconditional.
Hatred will never let you face
the beast in man.

One day, when you face this beast alone,
with your courage intact, your eyes kind,
untroubled
(even as no one sees them),
out of your smile
will bloom a flower.
And those who love you
will behold you
across ten thousand worlds of birth and dying.

Alone again,
I will go on with bent head,
knowing that love has become eternal.
On the long, rough road,
the sun and the moon
will continue to shine.

– “Recommendation,” Thích Nhất Hạnh (1965.)

Nhất Chi Mai, a Vietnamese Buddhist nun, taped a reading of this poem and left it for her parents before lighting herself on fire in protest of the Vietnam War. The funeral procession was five kilometers long.

Not everyone needs to burn to achieve change through awe, but perhaps they would not risk burning if they didn’t believe it would light the capacity for compassion – invincible, limitless, unconditional – within us.

When I think of awe, I normally recall times I’ve spent staring at the night sky and seeming to, myself, dissolve into the stars as the grass around me recedes into darkness. But there are many forms of awe. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s poem situates suffering, love, and vast moral courage within a larger continuity of existence. Moral beauty shows us what we may become.

In both forms, there is a blurring of the boundary between oneself and the world.

I’ve heard some anarchists – and Marxists – claim that art is “bourgeois” and beauty is only wasteful. Imagine, though, standing before a rainbow or standing beside grey, stone barracks. Which one will make you feel curious to become part of the world?

I was motivated by awe from something as simple as artwork in a card game I play. Cresselia, the embodiment of the crescent moon, uses its power to dispel bad dreams. A little girl, small in her pajamas, reaches into the night sky to receive its light. Her bedroom and the cosmos are rendered in the same sparkling glow, with no real boundary between them. Sometimes, a small act of compassion is large when our vulnerable heart is open to receiving it fully.

Even though Cresselia is a weak card on the field, my spirits lifted each time I played it. I was happy to lose the match, at times, if it meant we could both leave the match having witnessed something beautiful together. When I had Cresselia in the active spot, another player that could have easily knocked it out forced me to switch cards instead. It made me smile.

Beauty that elicits awe expands our frame of reference, giving us a sense of curiosity and a smallness that welcomes the world in as equals. There’s a hypothesis that awe quiets the parts of the brain devoted to self-reference. In an expansive circumstance, it may increase our prosociality; in a circumstance of domination, it instead may cause feelings of helplessness and constrictive submission.

I’ve argued elsewhere that both shame and denied legibility are vehicles for internalized domination when in a dependency relationship. Dominating awe, in contrast, involves scale and incomprehensibility.

While researchers Keltner and Haidt view primordial awe as an emotional mechanism developed to maintain social hierarchies, I suspect the cause of awe is rooted in predictive processing. Consider Keltner’s criteria for awe: vastness and accommodation — the literal rewriting of mental structures when a stimulus cannot be integrated into our current scope. This is a massive prediction error event. When we are confronted with scale or complexity that our current generative models cannot resolve, our brains are forced to accommodate the data, reducing the metabolic load of prediction errors by fundamentally expanding our priors.

When the State performs its vastness through tall monuments, widespread oppressive systems, and military action, we may perceive it as being too big to challenge. The awe invoked can oppress us. And to smile in spite of it is a moral beauty greater than coercive domination can achieve.

If domination seeks to make itself appear inevitable through displays of overwhelming scale and a naturalization of its systems, liberatory awe reveals that we already participate in something larger than domination, which is reality itself.

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

– “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” Rebecca Elson (2001, posthumously)

Rebecca Elson, an astronomer, was in her late 20s when she was diagnosed with cancer. Her poetry collection, named, “A Responsibility to Awe,” reflects her appreciation and connection to the universe as a small piece of it. She died in 1999.

Elson’s image of “bright wings” resonates with what thermodynamics tells us about transformation. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist now middle-aged, considers his own mortality somewhat often. On the matter, he recently said:

In death, you’ve pretty much got two choices in modern society. You can be buried – that’s my choice – so that the energy content of your body, which is still there when you die, your molecules were built up from your lifetime of eating and exercising and the building of your organs and your muscles and other tissue. In death, those molecules still contain energy.

If I’m buried, and decompose, all that energy gets absorbed by microbes – by flora and fauna dining upon my body the way I have dined upon flora and fauna my whole life, and in that way, giving back to the earth.

If you’re cremated, the energy content of those molecules doesn’t go away. It gets transferred to heat that then radiates infrared energy, that was once the energy content of the molecules of your body, out into space, moving at the speed of light. After someone has been cremated, you can keep a timeline. Where has their radiant energy reached by now?

If they were cremated four years ago, they would have reached the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. So that, in a way, you’re still a part of the universe, just in a different form.

– Neil deGrasse Tyson, Startalk.

There’s something comforting about the idea that we could leave our earthly karma behind and become part of the substrate for a new world, waiting to come into existence in 50 billion years – that if life was painful here, what’s left of us doesn’t have to stay here for another round. The universe is constantly changing, as are we. To hold us constant would make us objects, not subjects experiencing life in each moment.

The real and changing nature of life should be apparent to us, not weighed by drabness frozen in time. Marx showed us that the worker is alienated, building systems that come to oppress them and outlive those who design it. In prefiguration, we should aspire to beauty. To awe. To connection, motivated by each of our senses and a compassionate will. I strongly believe anarchist institutions, to portray liberation, must plan for their own supersession. If something no longer reflects us, it is no longer needed.

Beauty has a cost, as does every other part of life. But beauty is not valuable because it distracts us from suffering, nor because it serves ideology. Aesthetic awe and moral beauty expand the perceived scope of reality. In that expanded frame, domination ceases to appear ultimate.