This blog is a guest feature from Brian Robins, M.A., a student-psychologist at EBWS.
"It was 2019, and I was pursuing the halls of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art when I happened across a statue of Athena, the exhibit plaque of which said it was crafted around 170 B.C. Something about the looming figure took hold of my attention. I began to think about all of the people who had lived before me in the span of time since 170 B.C.
How many individual conscious beings have come and gone and lived entire lives with their own hopes, dreams, anxieties, and fears? A quick Google search revealed that roughly 177 billion humans have lived and died on this small rotating rock in an ever-expanding universe. How many would come after me? My existence, it seemed, was a cosmic blip. But this didn’t make me feel despondent in any way. On the contrary, this elicited a deluge of positive emotions. It felt refreshing, to say the least. All of my problems and worries were, in a sense, completely absurd.
Now that I am a doctoral student in clinical psychology, I can retrospect on this experience and refer to what I felt as an experience of the sublime. This was a concept first articulated by the philosopher Edmund Burke, that humans relish experiences of feeling small and cosmically inconsequential. Examples given are often connected to nature, such as staring at the ocean's vastness or gazing up at the stars.
In a sense, experiences of the sublime are a form of what’s known as perspective-taking in psychology. It allows us to look at our problems from different angles and question whether they are truly as catastrophic as we may initially assume when we are so deeply mired in them. How would your level of distress change if you were to zoom out thousands and thousands of miles from here? What would you find to be truly important in your life if looking down on Earth from space? Perhaps we could all use a bit of 'cosmic perspective-taking' from time to time for our own mental well-being."