ANIMALS SAID TO HAVE “SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES”

From Dateline Zero –

A team of researchers believe that animals have profound “spiritual experiences” — including out of body experiences. This is being suggested by Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky; and some others doing research into animals and “spiritual experiences.”

An article at Discovery News had this:

Research suggests that spiritual experiences originate deep within primitive areas of the human brain — areas shared by other animals with brain structures like our own.

The trick, of course, lies in proving animals’ experiences.

“Since only humans are capable of language that can communicate the richness of spiritual experience, it is unlikely we will ever know with certainty what an animal subjectively experiences,” Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky, told Discovery News.

“Despite this limitation, it is still reasonable to conclude that since the most primitive areas of our brain happen to be the spiritual, then we can expect that animals are also capable of spiritual experiences,” added Nelson, author of the book “The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain,” which will be published in January 2011.

The finding is an extension of his research on humans, which has been published in many peer-reviewed journals. A Neurology journal study, for example, determined that out-of-body experiences in humans are likely caused by the brain’s arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness.

“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,” he said. “There is absolutely no reason to believe it is any different for a dog, cat, or primate’s brain.”

Other mammals also probably have near-death experiences comparable to those reported by certain humans, he believes. Such people often say they saw a light and felt as though they were moving down a tunnel.

Unless I am misunderstanding, Kevin Nelson and his colleagues are doing their research from the perspective that “spiritual experiences” are simply generated by chemical reactions in the brain, and OBEs (out of body experiences) are all in the mind.

While maybe they could be right, and emotions are triggered by chemicals in the brain; I suspect that there is more to spirituality than that. Learning how something works doesn’t equal a deep understanding of “how” and “why” something is.

Meanwhile there are other studies being done into OBEs that are looking into the possibility that it is not simply all in the mind. A great project involves placing random symbols in operating rooms in locations that are not visible unless viewed from above.

If someone claims to have had an OBE or a near death experience in an operating room cooperating with this study, they can be asked to describe what was seen (without asking something like “did you see any symbols?”). If one of these symbols are mentioned without any prompting, that would be very significant.