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“It is a medicine for sorrow and despair,” she says, “let it sprout.” It is my grandmother that comes from the dead . . .

A primordial egg cracks and water flows. Lord Chaahk and Bolon Dzacab laugh loud.

The Sun of Wind strikes me with his lightning.

I take my first breath.

The defibrillator sends lightning through my body. My heart beats.

I am awake.

In this decaying and distilling, Yuria would be animated by growth. She would go on pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world, often traveling alone as an Indigenous woman. She carried out PhD scholarship on funerary rites, charting deep patterns in the Day of the Dead ceremonies in Mexico and Tibetan water rituals, in which we touch and hold on to the remains of the dead. Today she works for the United Nations on Indigenous rights. In her spare time she is preserving cloud forests in Chiapas.

When I ask Yuria about her experience, she explains it as a “nekyia,” a journey narrative that pays homage to book XI of Homer’s Odyssey (“nékys” means corpse in Ancient Greek). In most religions, Yuria explains, there are representations, in the form of stories, legends, poems, and myths, about journeys to the afterlife—Hades of ancient Greece, Sheol or hell in the Abrahamic traditions, Valhalla for the Norse, the bardo in Tibetan Buddhism, the Mictlán for the Indigenous Nahua, or Xibalbá for the Indigenous Maya. A nekyia journey, like a near-death experience, involves decay—the dissolution of the self; a distillation—celestial feelings of ascent found in surrender, chaos, and death; and growth—when we return to our waking lives. Understood within the science of mystical awe, nekyia are stories we tell to make sense of the inexplicable—what consciousness is like when we near death. Many religious and spiritual traditions, Yuria tells me, from rituals to iconography, grow from our collective effort to make sense of the mysteries of life.

Grounded in this idea, we can consider how religious and spiritual practices grow out of experiences of awe, in fact in ways we have already considered. Our awe-related vocalizations become sacred sounds, chanting, and music, allowing us to symbolize and share feelings about the Divine. With visual art—such as that of myriad Mesoamerican traditions—we represent the sacred geometries perceived during mystical awe. We tell symbolic stories of gods in awe-inspiring dance. Yoga offers a series of body postures that often manifest our physical expression of awe, and that bring us the bodily feeling of the Divine, as in this story of awe from twentieth-century yogi and mystic Gopi Krishna:

The illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring louder, I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt myself slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a halo of light. . . . I felt the point of consciousness that was myself growing wider, surrounded by waves of light. . . . I was now all consciousness, without any outline, without any idea of a corporeal appendage, without any feeling or sensation coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of light. . . . Bathed in light and in a state of exaltation and happiness impossible to describe.

Moving in unison becomes religious ceremony. Awe-related bowing, shaking, prostration, or looking to the sky give rise to ceremonial acts of reverence. Such rituals bring about a shared physiology, feeling, and attention to being part of something larger than the self. Muslims practicing the salat (the bowing performed five times a day) showed increased activation in the areas of the brain associated with acceptance, reflecting their sense of being connected to a Divine force that is larger than the self.

These many ways of representing mystical awe often come together in community spaces of awe-based intelligent design, of representations, symbols, and rituals that enable the collective experience of awe. The religiously inclined—about 60 percent of Americans—feel mystical awe at church, in prayer, when reading spiritual texts, while listening to sacred music, and when contemplating life and death. People who do not identify with a formal religion create their own “temples,” finding mystical awe in nature, or in a collective activity such as singing in a choir, or in dance, as Radha Agrawal does. Or in meditating or practicing yoga. Or in music, as Yumi Kendall does. Today, the Divine comes in many forms.