Spiritual Animal
A Journey into the Unspeakable
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.31519Keywords:
spirituality, religion, animals, transcendence, self-extension, affect, cognitionAbstract
Western scholars and other commentators have rarely considered nonhuman animals to have the capacity for spirituality. The tendency to coalesce spirituality with religion and to emphasize the cognitive, interpretative domain in discussions of spirituality has on the one hand led to the exclusion of nonhuman animals as agent-participants from the realm of spirituality, and on the other hand hindered explorations of spirituality as a phenomenon rooted in the body and the more ancient brain regions that humans share with other animals. While religion may be considered more appropriately within the framework of processes characterized by various extents of cognitive closure, spirituality manifests as a propensity of the intrinsically relational non-reflective, experiential consciousness, and may thus best be explored in terms of affective vitality. Cumulative evidence emerging from animal brain and culture sciences supports this proposition, while simultaneously opening doors to nonhuman animals as spiritual agents, helping to dismantle the illusion of human exceptionalism.
References
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Panksepp, Jaak, and Lucy Biven. 2012. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (New York: W.W. Norton).
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Rilke, Rainer M. 2009 [1923]. ‘The First Elegy’, in S. Mitchell (ed. and trans.), Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus (New York: Vintage International): 3.
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Sa?na, Carl. 2015. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (New York: Henry Hold & Co.).
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Schaefer, Donovan O. 2015. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham: Duke University Press).
Schore, Allan N. 2005. ‘Attachment, Affect Regulation, and the Developing Right Brain: Linking Developmental Neuroscience to Pediatrics’, Pediatrics in Review 26: 204-17.
Segal, Zindel V., et al. 2006. ‘Cognitive Reactivity to Sad Mood Provocation and the Prediction of Depressive Relapse’, Archives of General Psychiatry 63: 749-55.
Shiota, Michelle N., Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman. 2007. ‘The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept’, Cognition & Emotion 21.5: 944-63.
Snyder, Allan, Terry Bossomaier, and D. John Mitchell. 2004. ‘Concept Formation: “Object” Attributes Dynamically Inhibited from Conscious Awareness’, Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 3.1: 31-46.
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Vallortigara, Giorgio, et al. 2008. ‘Are Animals Autistic Savants?’, PLoS Biol 6.2: e42.
Webster, Donna M., and Arie W. Kruglanski. 1994. ‘Individual Differences in Need for Cognitive Closure’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67.6: 1049-62.
Willett, Cynthia. 2014. Interspecies Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press).
Zhu, Ying, Zhang, Li, Fan, Jin, and Shihui Han. 2007. ‘Neural Basis of Cultural In?uence on Self-representation’, NeuroImage 34: 1310-16.
Balcombe, Jonathan. 2016. What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York: Scienti?c American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Barrett Feldman, Lisa, et al. 2007. ‘Of Mice and Men: Natural Kinds of Emotions in the Mammalian Brain? A Response to Panksepp and Izard’, Perspectives on Psychological Science 2.3: 297-311.
Bataille, Georges. 1989. Theory of Religion (New York: Zone Books).
Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. 2009. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: Chicago University Press).
Bradshaw, G.A. 2005. ‘Elephant Trauma and Recovery: From Human Violence to Trans-Species Psychology’ (PhD diss., Paci?ca Graduate Institute).
Bradshaw, G.A. 2009. Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Bradshaw, G.A. 2017. Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Brooks Pribac, Teya. 2016. ‘Someone Not Something: Dismantling the Prejudicial Barrier in Knowing Animals (and the Grief which Follows)’, Animal Studies Journal 5.2: 52-77.
Cookson, Lawrence J. 2011. ‘A De?nition for Wildness’, Ecopsychology 3.3: 187-93.
Dagg, Anne I. 2011. Animal Friendships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace).
Davidson, Richard J. 2004. ‘Well-being and Affective Style: Neural Substrates and Biobehavioural Correlates’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 359: 1395-411.
de Waal, Frans. 1997. ‘Are We in Anthropodenial?’ Discovery Magazine, 1 July. Online: http://discovermagazine.com/1997/jul/areweinanthropod1180.
de Waal, Frans. 2013. The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.).
Despret, Vinciane. 2006. ‘Sheep Do Have Opinions’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press): 360-70.
Farb, Norman A.S., et al. 2007. ‘Attending to the Present: Mindfulness Meditation Reveals Distinct Neural Modes of Self-reference’, Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience 2.4: 313-22.
Fisher, Christopher L. 2005. ‘Animals, Humans and X-Men: Human Uniqueness and the Meaning of Personhood’, Theology and Science 3.3: 291-314.
Garland, Eric L., Brett Froelinger, and Matthew O. Howard. 2015. ‘Neurophysiological Evidence for Remediation of Reward Processing De?cits in Chronic Pain and Opioid Misuse Following Treatment with Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement: Exploratory ERP Findings from a Pilot RCT’, J Behav Med 38: 327-36.
Geertz, Clifford. 1975. ‘On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding’, American Scientist 63: 47-53.
Goodall, Jane. 2006. ‘The Dance of Awe’, in P. Waldau and K. Patton (eds.), A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science & Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press): 651-56.
Gross, Aaron S. 2015. The Question of the Animal and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press).
Han, Shihui, and Georg Northoff. 2009. ‘Understanding the Self: A Cultural Neuroscience Approach’, in J.Y. Chiao (ed.), Progress in Brain Research 178.14: 203-12.
Harrod, James B. 2011. ‘A Trans-Species De?nition of Religion’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 5.3: 327-53.
Harrod, James B. 2014. ‘The Case for Chimpanzee Religion’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8.1: 8-45.
Harrod, James B. 2016. ‘Conceiving Animacy: A Group-Theoretic Transformation Formula De?ning Spirituality, Based on Neuroscience and Attuned to Global Etymologies’. Paper presented at ‘Religion, Science and the Future’, Conference for the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, January 14-17, The University of Florida.
Harvey, Graham. 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World (London: Hurst & Co.).
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge).
Johnstone, Brick, et al. 2012. ‘Right Parietal Lobe-Related “Sel?essness” as the Neuropsychological Basis of Spiritual Transcendence’, International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 22.4: 267-84.
Juhl, Jacob, and Clay Routledge. 2014. ‘Finding the Terror that the Social Self Manages: Interdependent Self-Construal Protects Against the Anxiety Engendered by Death Awareness’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 33.4: 365-79.
Kelley, Carl F. 2009 [1997]. Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Kierkegaard, Soren. 1980 [1841]. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with A.B. Anderson; Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Kirmayer, Laurence J., Christopher Fletcher, and Robert Watt. 2008. ‘Locating the Ecocentric Self: Inuit Concepts of Mental Health and Illness’, in L.J. Kirmayer and G. Guthrie Valaskakis (eds.), Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press): 289-314.
Markus, Hazel R., and Shinobu Kitayama. 1991. ‘Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation’, Psychological Review 98.2: 224-53.
McGilchrist, Iain. 2009. The Mastery and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Midgley, Mary. 2002 [1979]. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London: Routledge).
Morse, Melvin L. 1994. ‘Near Death Experience and Death-Related Visions in Children: Implications for the Clinician’, Current Problems in Pediatrics 24: 55-83.
Nelson, Kevin. 2011. The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist’s Search for the God Experience (New York: Dutton).
Northoff, Georg, et al. 2006. ‘Self-referential Processing in our Brain—A Meta-analysis of Imaging Studies on the Self’, NeuroImage 31: 440-57.
Northoff, Georg, and Jaak Panksepp. 2008. ‘The Trans-Species Concept of Self and the Subcortical-Cortical Midline System’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12.7: 259-64.
Panksepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Panksepp, Jaak, and Lucy Biven. 2012. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (New York: W.W. Norton).
Payne, Peter, Peter A. Levine, and Mardi A. Crane-Godreau. 2015. ‘Somatic Experiencing: Using Interoception and Proprioception as Core Elements of Trauma Recovery’, Frontiers in Psychology 6.93:1-18.
Proust, Marcel. 2014 [1913]. Remembrance of Things Past [In Search of Lost Time] (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff; Adelaide: University of Adelaide e-book).
Rilke, Rainer M. 2009 [1923]. ‘The First Elegy’, in S. Mitchell (ed. and trans.), Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus (New York: Vintage International): 3.
Rohr, Richard. 2008. ‘Becoming Stillness’, Public lecture, Norwich Cathedral. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TGS-JD80nE.
Sa?na, Carl. 2015. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (New York: Henry Hold & Co.).
Schaefer, Donovan O. 2012. ‘Do Animals Have Religion? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Religion and Embodiment’, Anthrozoös 25: S173-89.
Schaefer, Donovan O. 2015. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham: Duke University Press).
Schore, Allan N. 2005. ‘Attachment, Affect Regulation, and the Developing Right Brain: Linking Developmental Neuroscience to Pediatrics’, Pediatrics in Review 26: 204-17.
Segal, Zindel V., et al. 2006. ‘Cognitive Reactivity to Sad Mood Provocation and the Prediction of Depressive Relapse’, Archives of General Psychiatry 63: 749-55.
Shiota, Michelle N., Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman. 2007. ‘The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept’, Cognition & Emotion 21.5: 944-63.
Snyder, Allan, Terry Bossomaier, and D. John Mitchell. 2004. ‘Concept Formation: “Object” Attributes Dynamically Inhibited from Conscious Awareness’, Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 3.1: 31-46.
The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. 2012. Francis Crick Memorial Conference, Cambridge, UK. Online: fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf.
Valdesolo, Piercarlo, and Jesse Graham. 2014. ‘Awe, Uncertainty, and Agency Detection’, Psychological Science 25.1: 170-78.
Vallortigara, Giorgio, et al. 2008. ‘Are Animals Autistic Savants?’, PLoS Biol 6.2: e42.
Webster, Donna M., and Arie W. Kruglanski. 1994. ‘Individual Differences in Need for Cognitive Closure’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67.6: 1049-62.
Willett, Cynthia. 2014. Interspecies Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press).
Zhu, Ying, Zhang, Li, Fan, Jin, and Shihui Han. 2007. ‘Neural Basis of Cultural In?uence on Self-representation’, NeuroImage 34: 1310-16.
Published
2018-02-19
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Brooks Pribac, T. (2018). Spiritual Animal: A Journey into the Unspeakable. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 11(3), 340-360. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.31519
