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In our evolution as a most cultural primate, humans have been finding awe in visual art for tens of thousands of years. Our aesthetic capacities for creation and appreciation have allowed us to see the geometries of the natural and social worlds and navigate those worlds with greater intelligence. Across history, awe-inspiring visual art has allowed us to find hints of what we make together of the ever-changing mysteries of life. Visual art allows us to directly experience awe and enjoy its individual and collective benefits. In the service of promoting cultural evolution through changing minds and history, visual art has shocked and awed people into new ways of seeing the world. These themes ran through a series of stories Steven Spielberg shared from his life of visual awe.

Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, hosted a small gathering in Los Angeles on technology and social progress, which I was lucky enough to attend. When it was my turn to present, I spoke of how to measure awe in the chills, in tears, in the vagus nerve, in the voice and face, and in the DMN, and how awe moves us to wonder and saintly tendencies. As I was talking about the chills, Steven raised his hand. I paused my presentation and, in a slightly absurd act, called on him. He told the story of being awestruck at seeing his new grandchild being born, Kate leaning into his leg while sitting on the floor.

Later that night I happened to sit next to Steven and Kate when out for dinner. They spoke of their careers in film and painting. Of West Side Story, the 2021 remake that Steven had just wrapped up. Of the funeral for Kirk Douglas, who used to frequent Steven’s mom’s restaurant in LA to flirt with her. Stories about how the crying was so intense on the set of Schindler’s List that one actress needed three days of therapeutic intervention to recover from re-creating this awesome archive of the horrors of the Holocaust.

I had to ask:

Steven, what was awe like for you as a child?

Without missing a beat, he recalled seeing his first film when he was five. His dad, an engineer involved in the invention of the computer, took him from their home in Camden, New Jersey, to a theater in Philadelphia. As they inched forward in a long line near the brick walls of the theater, young Steven, holding tightly to his dad’s large hand above, thought they were going to the circus. Instead, it was to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth from 1952. After a wave of disappointment, Steven started to attend to the film’s grainy images. Two trains career down the tracks. A character in a car drives alongside, trying to warn them. To no avail. The trains collide and cars fly everywhere, bodies hurtling into space. Young Steven felt suspended in time, wonderstruck. Awed.

At home, Steven began crashing the cars of his model train set. His dad had to repair the trains repeatedly, so he let Steven borrow the family video camera instead, which he used to stage and film more than one hundred toy train wrecks. No damage was done in this realm of the imagination, just the sacred geometry of make-believe destruction.

One night his dad gathered him up and hustled him into the car. They went to a field and lay on their backs on blankets. A meteor shower washed over the sky. Steven recalls the light, the profusion of stars, how vast the night sky was, and his experiments with seeing—directly, or out of the corner of the eye—fleeting patterns of stellar awe.

It was this wonder of life he hoped to give to others in E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

As Steven asked for the check, he summed up why he still goes to movies and makes movies for others:

We are all equal in awe.

NINE THE FUNDAMENTAL IT How Spiritual Life Grows out of Awe

As I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.

• BLACK ELK

Twant me, ’twas the Lord. I always told him, “I trust to you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me,” and he always did.

• HARRIET TUBMAN