A good friend recently shared an article with me – Childhood Origins of Altered States in Adults: Psychology Today – about some recent research into the sometimes naturally occurring “altered states” of children.

One aspect of this research considered how expanded states of awareness that are often readily experienced by children may parallel those sometimes sought by adults – through meditation, hallucinogens, and various other methods and techniques.

From his reading of this article, my friend inferred that the contemplative states of non-humans might be similar to the “altered” states experienced by young humans.

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Expanded states of awareness in children typically dissipate as they grow older, because the human mind of today’s societies directly encourages and promotes fearful self-contraction, rather than disciplining and dissolving separateness and fear.

While the altered states of early childhood are usually purer, and less complicated, than those of most adults, with increasing age, our self-contraction of natural conductivity increasingly constrains us in spiraling neuroses – unless we have developed good preparation through applied self-discipline, purification, and regeneration.

The chronic absence of good conductivity of bodily, emotional, and subtle energies almost always limits our fully free participation in expanded states, with our awareness being restricted in feedback loops of various mind-forms, superstitions, religiosity, and so forth.

In younger children, the prevalence of these qualities is much less of an issue.

And with regard to non-humans, negative motions of mind, body, and thought mostly do not even arise – unless animals and plants have been negatively influenced by human contact.

Altered, or expanded states of awareness in humans are not “altered” at all for animals!

All the benign qualities and functions of expanded awareness that arise naturally and spontaneously in non-humans are tacitly informed by their inherence in naturally Contemplative states, which derive from their intrinsic awareness of the limits of conditional existence, and a natural surrender into – and deeply beyond – those limits.

– Stuart

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For more reading on the rarely discussed topic of expanded awarenesses in non-humans, see the book, Lightning Thunder Cows.