We’re not neurologically concluded as to how this happens.
In some cases, it’s an ‘accident’ neurologically - that much we do know.
However, that isn’t nearly always the case.
For that instance we haven’t yet achieved a laboratory evidenced answer.
This is also a generally good read, whether you agree or not with the various chapters and authors.
It’s a stimulating read, is what I’m suggesting.
If you don’t agree with a part, you’ll be provoked to correct the point and further refine an idea.
Where you do agree with a part, you’ll have the opportunity of possibly being surprised with something along your thoughts, but with new information or perceptions.
In the absence of either, I would argue that it’s also just interesting to read what our psychology and neuroscience communities are discussing on the matter of human spirituality.
I think the psychological approach is misguided, and assumes from the outset that there is nothing about these places that is objectively numinous. I don’t think this is the case. Numinous feelings are similar to the tingling of the skin you get from static electricity, and this might be because that’s precisely what they are, electrical. Electrical currents flow in the earth, accumulating at certain points due to the layout of the landscape.
I learn something every day. Thank you Maia. I do not think telluric currents are associated with numinousity. But who am I to say as I do not think I have felt what you describe. Would birds on a wire (power line) experience a greater amount of numinous feelings? Maybe humans of the past were in greater tune with these sorts of sensations. Who knows? Anything is possible.
Primitive aspects within hidden, behind modern clouds.
I agree and this fits my earlier response in the thread. If from the outset you assume that the brain simply gets triggered into certain states, and this has to do with the person’s past, specific personality (only), then you have taken an ontological stand.
Further if this is the only belief you dare to stand by, it will affect the experiences you have.
To the scientist it seems cautious…
but in actual fact it is a belief with potential pluses and minuses just like any ontological stand - or epistemological stand.
If you believe you can know, in advance of scientific demonstration, this allows you to have different kinds of experiences - and to take them seriously which often extends and deepens them and leads to others.
Some places are special. I think that may be in part because of the damage other places have received but that’s another story.
The psychological approach would suck the life out of love also. Your feelings well, they are really about what is happening in your brain’s neurons, not about the other person.
My view is that both cases are probably occurring.
I don’t think it’s a situation of ‘either, or’; but instead ‘this and that’.
For instance, I can increase the likelihood of someone having a numinous sensation through acoustical manipulation (it’ll either accomplish the affect, or cause them to vomit - one of the two [sensitivity ranges]). See Dr. Rupert Till and his work acoustically studying Stonehenge for an example of this kind of event.
Conversely, there can be absolutely nothing objective about the event at all - such as a single line on a piece of paper. See Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and his work on temporal lobe epilepsy for overt examples of this kind of event.
And finally, as a sub-order of this form, there are also those events which can be subjectively objective. Some things will only be reactive with/to some people and not others. Sort of like allergies, but instead, we’re discussing neurological signaling.
For instance, some people can taste metal from a needle injecting into their veins by nurses or doctors while other people have no such sensory at all.
To my knowledge, this sub-order hasn’t been examined yet in a scientific manner, but is often times mentioned in psychological analysis of human spirituality as a grounds for discrediting objectivity; which is, I agree, a misnomer of a claim considering the bountiful subjectively objective articles we have known to us in all other aspects of reality.
If animals do experience numinous feelings I cannot imagine they would experience them everywhere. I have seen and heard the slaughtering of animals and their experience appears, to me, as being quite different to that of special, sacred, magical.
The entire phenomenon of sacramental religion is based on the numinal function of objects. Sacramental objects are too numerous to mention. Trees have had a numinous effect on me from time to time throughout my life. Two nights ago I dreamed of a tree bigger than a sequoia reaching into the clouds so that I could not see the top. This I take to be an archetypal dream and it evoked a numinous feeling that still lingers. A sacred tree like the Bodhi tree often often marks the sacred omphalion which is Greek “navel of the earth”.
I don’t think we can really know, either way, what animals are truly “thinking”, so whether they have numinous feelings or not seems beyond our grasp, even if it makes any sense at all. They certainly feel things like fear though.
No, I will not take Bible lessons from monotheists. I think monotheism has destroyed the sacred connection with the earth and done more to promote human misrery than anything in history. It is the true evil.
The main five senses being
Sight, Hearing, Taste, Smell, Touch
Other senses are:
Balance and acceleration, Temperature, Kinesthetic sense, Pain, Time, plus other internal bodily senses.
Non-Human Senses:
Electroception is the ability to detect electric fields. Several species of fish, sharks, and rays have the capacity to sense changes in electric fields in their immediate vicinity. The only orders of mammals that are known to demonstrate electroception are the dolphin and monotreme orders. Among these mammals, the platypus has the most acute sense of electroception.
However, in general humans (and it is presumed other mammals) can detect electric fields only indirectly by detecting the effect they have on hairs. An electrically charged balloon, for instance, will exert a force on human arm hairs, which can be felt through tactition and identified as coming from a static charge (and not from wind or the like). This is not electroception, as it is a post-sensory cognitive action.