Numinous

From Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind:
Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one's acceptance of the supernatural -- of God, of a Beyond -- but now I'm not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything." Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child's-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face.

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