In this article, an exercise in Jewish philosophy, I propose a taxonomy that can account for and organize all of the many species of holiness that we find in the Hebrew Bible. Each species admits of precise definition. Moreover, the genus as a whole can be unified by a guiding metaphor, suggested by the Bible itself. Holiness, according to this metaphor, is bestowed by a certain type of gaze, and ultimately by occupying the centre of the field of God's attention.

This paper looks first at the scope of religious experience, offering some representative examples of phenomena that typically give rise to spiritual experiences. This leads on a consideration of the phenomenology of such experiences – the particular way in which they present themselves to the conscious subject. Lastly, the paper tackles the vexed question of the source of such experiences, and suggests that this is best understood in terms of a (certain kind of) theistic framework.

This research examined whether feeling awe weakens people's desire for money. Two experiments demonstrated that, as a self-transcendent emotion, awe decreased people's money desire. In Experiment 1, recalling a personal experience of awe makes people place less importance on money, compared with recalling an experience of happiness and recalling a neutral experience. In experiment 2, we examined different variants of awe, such as negative awe and non-nature awe. Viewing images that elicited awe, no matter what kind of awe, can induce people to put less effort into obtaining money. Process evidence suggested that awe's weakening of money desire was due to its power to make people transcend their mundane concerns. Our findings have implications for willingness to donate, price sensitivity, religious practices, and economic utilities.

Awe is a feeling of wonder and amazement in response to experiencing something so vast that it transcends one's current frames of reference. Across three experiments (N = 557), we tested the inhibition effect of awe on aggression. We used a narrative recall task paradigm (Studies 1 and 2) and a video (Study 3) to induce the emotion of awe. After inducing awe, we first examined participants’ emotion and their sense of ‘small self’, and then the manifestation of aggressiveness in a Shooting Game (Study 1), Tangram Help/Hurt Task (Studies 2 and 3) and Aggression-IAT (Study 3), respectively. Results indicated that awe reduced aggression and increased prosociality and a sense of small self relative to neutral affect and positive emotions of happiness and amusement. Mediation analyses evidenced mixed support for a sense of small self mediating the effect of awe on aggression and prosociality.