On Connecting to Something Larger Than Yourself

Across very nearly every culture that has ever existed, human beings have reached for something beyond themselves, a god, a spirit, the ancestors, the vast and ancient cosmos. The particular shapes differ enormously, and yet the impulse is strikingly universal. Far from being a weakness to outgrow, this reaching seems to answer a genuine human need, and to do something measurable to us when we finally meet it.

The science of awe

Researchers who study awe, the feeling that washes over you beneath an enormous night sky, inside a soaring cathedral, before the open ocean, or during a piece of music that takes the top of your head off, have found something remarkable. Awe tends to shrink the self. In those moments the endless inner monologue about your own worries falls quiet, your sense of your own importance softens, and you feel yourself to be a small part of something vast. Studies have linked experiences of awe to lower stress, greater generosity, and a stronger sense of connection to other people. The feeling of smallness, which you might expect to be deflating, tends to leave people lighter rather than diminished. It is a strange and lovely finding, that being humbled by something larger turns out to be one of the more restorative things we can do.

What the practices share

Look across the world's traditions and you keep meeting the same handful of tools, reached for again and again by people who never met: prayer and meditation, chant and song, ritual, the gathering of community, and long stretches of time spent in wild and beautiful places. Whatever the belief behind them, these practices do remarkably similar things in the body, slowing it, settling it, and drawing a person up out of narrow self-focus into a felt sense of belonging to something beyond the edges of their own skin. The doctrines vary endlessly. The underlying movement is almost always the same.

Held open

What that something larger actually is may be the oldest and most personal question a person can ask. For some it is God, named and known and prayed to within a tradition. For others it is the universe, or nature, or simply the quiet web of life that connects every living thing. Among Roses does not presume to settle that question for you, and there is a real respect in not trying to. What does seem clear, across all the differences, is that the reaching itself, the turning toward something greater than your own small story, is a deep and recurring part of being human, and that meeting it in some form tends to do us good.

Nature as the open door

If the word God feels too loaded, or simply too far away, nature tends to be the most accessible doorway of all. You need no particular belief to stand beneath old trees, or beside the sea, or out where the night sky is genuinely dark and thick with stars, and feel something in you go quiet and grow large at the same time. People who spend time in nature are reliably calmer and less anxious for it, and part of what they are receiving is precisely this, a regular, bodily reminder that the world is enormous and ancient and beautiful, and that they belong to it. The transcendent is not always far off in a temple. Very often it waits as near as a walk among trees.

Why it matters now

Modern life is unusually skilled at sealing us inside our own heads, our own problems, our own ceaseless projects of self-improvement. The remedy that so many traditions point toward is the same one in different clothing: step deliberately into something vast. Take the long look at the stars. Sit in a silence that feels like prayer, whether or not you would ever choose to call it that. Practise the deliberate humility of remembering that you are a small and temporary part of an immense and astonishing whole, and notice how, rather than crushing you, it tends to let you set something heavy down.

An invitation, not an instruction

However you understand it, you are allowed to reach. To sit in a quiet that feels holy. To let yourself feel small beneath a wide sky and discover, perhaps to your surprise, that it arrives as relief rather than as threat. Connection to something larger than ourselves has steadied human beings for as long as there have been human beings to be steadied, and it asks for no particular creed in order to begin. You are warmly invited to find your own version of it, and to call it by whatever name rings true for you.