Awe

I used to be an atheist.

Recently, I think I found God in my body.

I also found love in my body.

I find that most of the divine is programmed into my body, that the divine came in my flesh, only waiting to be discovered.

Flesh is wise. It carries the wisdom God gave us.

Humans possess nerves that we call CT fibers. CT fibers are part of the peripheral nervous system. Sparsed on our skin, their mechanoreceptors only respond to the deep, slow mechanical touch of a human. Heat, pain, brushes go completely unnoticed by their receptors; they are blind to anything but sensuous touch.

When activated by a deep embrace, a caress, the weight of another's body on ours, C fibers flow electricity into the brain, just like any other sensory nerve.

All sensory fibers normally pass through sensory cortices, regions that map and analyse them. There, sensory cues get sorted into reaction and processing, redirected to their respective hubs after engrained logical sorting. They are the heart of analytical sensory processing. All senses are sorted here: temperature for physical cautioning such as sweating or shivering, vision for processing a scene, auditory senses to understand words and their meanings.

C fibers are the one exception. When activated by human touch, they bypass the sensory cortices of processing entirely and flow directly into the insula, then the limbic system — the emotional center of the brain. Fibers that only sense caresses, by miracle, bypass normal anatomy to connect directly to raw emotion.

Social bonding is built into our physiology. We have somehow evolved mechanical proteins that can only sense a lover's touch, an entire nerve pathway that drifted from analytical processing of love directly into the rawness of a touch and the primal emotion it ignites.

The body knows love, it was built for it. The body knows the safety of a lover's hand on your waist, the slow, deep touch of an embrace, the pressing of another's body on ours, as not needing any form of intellect, just a primal knowledge engrained in the flesh of our C fibers; that touch is emotionally significant enough to bypass standard anatomy. Just like trees and vines, our bodies wrapped and evolved around neurons that make us fall in love.

Awe and God are analogously engrained into our flesh. Submission to the divine is physically present in the anatomical configuration of a body, and, through many diverse conversations across Californian landscapes, I have come to discover God in my flesh.

Awe is the only positive emotion that leads to surrender and not activation. It is the grandest of the positive.

Joy, excitement, desire and happiness all activate the body. Neurological triggers of the sympathetic nervous system, they prime the body's flesh for propulsion and movement towards. The pupils dilate, heart rate accelerates, bronchioles of the lungs dilate to take in more oxygen. Vasodilation in skeletal muscles delivers increased oxygen and power for movement: the body prepares to activate, desires movement towards an object.

Every positive arousal is reaching. Desire is a reach for love in the lover, excitement for money a reach for power, delight a reach for pleasure in the moment. Most importantly — propulsion keeps you in your body, in yourself. Joy, excitement and desire are anatomically fundamentally selfish emotions: they all refer to the self. You feel them because something about the world pleases you.

Awe is the opposite motion: it is stillness. And it is not about you at all. You are not in awe: the world submits you to it. And that same surrender is the emotion.

The heart rate slows, the vagus nerve activates, the breath rate slows down and elongates, leading to deeper, stiller breaths. The gaze softens, vasculature expands, and muscles relax. Because there is nowhere to go, and nothing to seize. There is simply a body to surrender to something bigger, and so the body fuses fully into the calmest parasympathetic state of vastness, the recognition of it, and the submission to it.

Is this not God giving us a flesh physically designed to speak to Him? Is this not God communicating to us, through our anatomy, that we belong to more — not just to ourselves?

Our bodies were primed for self-dissolution, the forgetting of the self, so they could tune to the perfection of what we actually belong to; not our minds, but our world.

Our bodies were primed for the divine through the parasympathetic anatomy of awe. There is something deep in our flesh, that, when exposed to the mountains of Yosemite or the savannahs of Kenya, goes completely silent. There is wisdom in our flesh that recognizes God and forgets itself when exposed to it.

The default mode network, the self-referential flesh of our brain that activates when thinking of ourselves, goes completely silent under awe. Non-coincidentally, the DMN is the same area that is chemically suppressed under psychedelics, experiences where God seems to be present all around, at an ominous frequency that was always there, simply constrained by our own.

There is wisdom in flesh that recognises divine beauty and changes the body accordingly to remind the human what he is a part of. There is wisdom in our anatomy that configures recognition of the divine into a complete neurological state, a state of final calmness.

Awe silences the body; it silences the mind. Awe is depth, and it is vast. It is the positive emotion of final grandeur, where the self dissolves and focus expands instead of narrows.

The lips of a lover on one's neck narrow focus onto the warmth of their mouth. All else disappears.

The pleasure of a gluttonous meal narrows focus onto taste. All else disappears.

The euphoria of money narrows focus onto power and accomplishment. All else disappears.

Awe expands attention. Awe does not narrow attention. Nothing disappears; all expands.

Awe fuses the body into vastness, noticing every detail of it, forgetting itself in the process. Noticing the patterns of life; a hummingbird hovering over a wild orchid; the waterfalls pouring into the granites of the forest in tumultuous roars; the cool air of an alpine breeze caressing hot skin; the smoky yellow light of the sun glimmering on the carved cement of San Francisco's skyscrapers, my neck reaching upwards, walking beside another who notices that same glimmer, both necks stretched not towards each other but towards beauty; the sunsets of Ethiopia, where the rays of blinding bright yellows seem to taste golden brown, like the perfect crisp of a crème brûlée, smoked and sweet, an aroma baked with a burning too tender, a fire too creamy; the sight of a lion playing with his cubs; and much more of grandeur that I forget the longer I stray away from my home, Africa, my land of awe.

Melting into vastness is engrained in our anatomy just as love is. And, studying medicine, from anatomy textbooks to hospital shifts, I can only see the presence of God in our flesh, configured into the perfect engineering of our nervous systems and biochemistry, there at each moment, designing and shaping our bodies with His knowing hands for our bodies to physically carry and know vastness and what we are a part of; nature, beauty, that we are a repetition of nature's patterns and life's patterns ourselves, that physical boundaries are an illusion, through awe. And love, shaped into our C fibers like vines climbing up a body, activated through a loving human touch and shaping our brain with no prior processing or demand; simply flesh and its knowledge.