The role of awe in spirituality: why rainbows are realer than reality

As is explained in Diana L. Eck’s Darsan, prayer in Indian Hinduism is described as the eponymous Darsan, seeing the image of patron diety, the sight of something divine. To me, this is a way to describe what I believe to be a universal experience – the sensation of awe.

Sight is a unique sense in the fact that it can discern physicality at a distance – every surface and facet of an object can be accurately interpreted simply by looking at it. Smell/taste can tell you your distance to an object, but it can’t tell you it’s shape – that requires extrapolation. Hearing is the same way, it will tell you in what direction a stimulus is coming from, perhaps even its distance, but what did the noise-maker look and feel like? In this way, sight is a sense that many people associate with reality. There’s a reason that seeing is believing, or so they say.

Awe, I believe, is what happens when our reality is broken; when something that shouldn’t be, is. Strange noises and smells carry with them emotion and information, but they’re understandable in a way that light isn’t – you can create new noises I your head, and smells are made of fairly imaginable component scents. But sight defies expectations – you can’t think up a new color.

Rainbows, lightning, sunsets, the full moon – all of these experiences have mystical representation in most, if not all, religions. They defy what we expect to be true, colors shouldn’t just appear out of air, beams of light shouldn’t shoot to the earth with thunderous cries, and orbs of light so far out of reach that not even the tallest clouds can reach them completely shatter our preconceptions of what is true and real.

With this in mind, it makes sense that statues of gods are often adorned with gold, gems, and precious materials – things that are hard to find in nature and usually so rare as to become inordinately expensive. In this same vein, it explains why we often see objects of holy importance or spiritual significance glowing and flashing in strange colors and geometries – things that shouldn’t be real but exist anyways.