Children, Non-Human Animals and Mysticism

Mystical experiences are natural neurological events

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”– Picasso

Mysticism and spirituality involve the brain naturally if unusually functioning in particular ways. With their brains functioning differently than that of adult humans, and young children and non-human animals literally perceiving the world differently, children and non-human animals appear to be able to, if perhaps not more able to, think in spiritual ways. 

Psychology professors Lisa Miller of Columbia University and Diana Divech of Yale have written that children are born hardwired for mystical thinking, and this type of thinking is important for their mental development. Australian child psychologist Rebecca Nye writes that “a growing body of research demonstrates that children’s spirituality is not something esoteric, nor something exclusive to precocious children. Also, it is not limited to particular religious exercises, nor something we need to turn to the early lives of saints to find out about.”

Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes and Tufts University philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett wrote that children’s brains lack the mature cognitive structuring of adults that normally suppresses mystical thinking in our daily lives. Jaynes says that it is not coincidence that traditionally many religious “seers” were children. This also indicates that the spiritual or mystical way of thinking is something they often grow out of.  

Notice that in stories how often it is the child who has the transcendental experiences that the adults don’t. Peter Pan to The Exorcist to Wizard of Oz to Little Red Riding Hood. In The Shining, five-year-old Danny has epileptic seizures where “It’s like when I go to sleep, he shows me things.” In Peter Pan, Peter’s childhood experiences are forgotten as an adult. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy has her fantastic adventure while knocked out, literally being in a different state of consciousness. 

The psychically gifted Danny in The Shining

Further, in many ways children psychologically and optically perceive the world differently than adults. The following are two particularly fascinating examples:

• Adults’ brains combine senses to make one holistic perception of the physical world. However, young children’s brains keep separate each sense, including eye-to-eye. The result is that adults can identify some physical qualities in a scene that young kids cannot, and kids can identify physical qualities that adults cannot. 

• For kids under a certain age, what they know is more important than what they see. When asked to draw a coffee cup in front of them with the handle hidden from view on the other side, an adult will draw a cup as seen without a handle. The young child, who can’t see but knows there is a handle on the cup, will draw the cup with a handle on the side. 

The question to ponder is which drawing is more accurate. Consider that Picasso, who trained himself over years to draw like a child, was a pioneer in cubism. His cubist paintings the three-dimensional sides of a figure in two dimensions.

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Non-Human Animals

While humans can never know what non-human animals subjectively perceive, and non-human animals’ perception involves sensory information outside of human’s sight and hearing, a number of medical scientists believe non-human animals have the capability of having spiritual and mystical experiences.

As with young children, non-human animals do not have the advanced cognitive structuring that adult’s human use, and process information using the emotional parts of their brains. Some thus believe non-human animals have more direct, realistic experience of their physical world

Research points to spiritual experiences coming from deep primitive areas of the human brain. These areas are shared by other animals with similar brain structures. University of Kentucky neurology professor Kevin Nelson and University of Colorado evolutionary biology professor Marc Bekoff both believe animals have spiritual experiences comparable to what humans have. 

Writes Nelson: “It is still reasonable to conclude that since the most primitive areas of our brain happen to be spiritual, then we can expect that animals are also capable of spiritual experiences . . . In humans, we know that if we disrupt the (brain) region where vision, sense of motion, orientation in the Earth’s gravitational field, and knowing the position of our body all come together, then out-of-body experiences can be caused literally by the flip of a switch. There is absolutely no reason to believe it is any different for a dog, cat, or primate’s brain.”