This article further explores the concepts of risk, peril, and awe within biophilic design, highlighting their psychological significance. I argue that these feelings reveal truths about our existence and relationship to nature, encouraging humility and recognition of our transience as humans. Ultimately, it suggests that experiencing awe fosters a deeper connection with the environment.
Note: This post explores the psychological and wellbeing benefits of naturism within biophilic environments. It contains illustrations depicting nudity and the human form.
Experience awe for a deeper connection to nature
I have previously written about risk, peril and awe. These are regarded as patterns of biophilia that are only just being developed as elements of biophilic design.
- Risk / peril is thought of as a feeling of an unidentifiable threat. The biophilic solution leads to the knowledge that a reliable safeguard exists.
- Awe relates to the stimuli that defy an existing frame of reference and which leads to a change in perception.
These two patterns can be the ones that can be most revealing of themselves and of ourselves. This is the bridge between biophilia and aletheia.
The patterns of risk / peril and awe are deeply rooted in our innate psychological and biological responses.
Aletheia is all about revealing the truth about oneself and the environments we use, so when a space where truth and unconcealedness are central, the experience becomes about confronting reality directly and authentically – and almost reverentially.
Awe and reverence
I am not remotely religious or spiritual. I am a humanist and am content in my belief that we have only one life. I try to make sense of the world through logic, reason, and evidence, and always seek to treat those around me with warmth, understanding, and respect. I don’t believe that there was a divine creator – I think we are the products of nature, evolution and happenstance.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t look on the world without a sense of awe. I do. I also respect and even revere nature and I am sympathetic to the concept of Gaia as expounded by James Lovelock – not as a superorganism, but as a metaphor for a self-regulating system of living and non-living processes.
Nature is full of places that are jaw-droppingly astonishing and awesome in the true sense of the word. Humanity has created spaces with the specific aim of eliciting an emotional response – often religious (or at least worshipful), all the way back to the stone age.
Humanity has also created great art and music that inspires awe and reverence that can trigger profound emotional responses.
Awe is an emotion that can make one recognise vulnerability and help reveal the truth of our place in the grandness of nature and the vastness of time and space.
This is a healthy reaction. It helps us to recognise our personal vulnerability and also our need to be connected to the environment for our individual and collective survival.
As Carl Sagan reminds us, the Pale Blue Dot in space that is Earth is all that we have.
We are transient
If we are lucky, we will spend 80-odd years alive – about 0.03% of the amount of time modern humans have existed. That is not even a flicker in the 4.5 billion years that the Earth has been around.
It probably does us some good to experience awe as well as the feeling of humbleness as we reflect on our transience and in our position as just one of over eight billion humans alive today, and the countless billions who will ever have lived.
Strip away the artificial social armour of clothing and stand naked, alone in nature to get a real sense of the truth of our place in the universe.
Unhidden, unconcealed, unprotected. This is the reality of our existence – even for those of us fortunate to live comfortably.
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