Spiritual Meanings

Some individuals may more willingly incorporate spiritual beliefs into their pareidolic experiences, perhaps the face in the tree or cloud is delivering a divine message.

We already instinctively assign emotions and personalities to face-like images, and we project how we feel onto the form as well. The use of a colon and a closed parenthesis :) is a good example to ascribe happiness through an emoji.

Our minds are hardwired to recognize patterns. This perceptual capacity is exquisitely tuned to the organic world in which we evolved; laboratory research finds that we are most apt to see pareidolias in scenes that display a visual complexity roughly equivalent to the scenes we encounter outdoors.

Our visual perception is an optical illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual concept that arguably may appear to be different from reality. Research has found that spending time looking at ambiguous figures or “primes”, a creative mindset will induce people to think with more fluency, flexibility, and originality.

Contemplating these forms invites us to step out of a literal, cut-and-dried worldview where everything is exactly as it seems and into a world that is enigmatic, emotional, and even fantastical.

Our creative, divine soul seems to process external sensory stimuli differently, in that it tends to more easily connect natural elements together in oneness with ourselves to reshape our reality.