Mystical Experiences
I was doing some digging, and came across this information on a really biased website: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Spirituality
Spirituality is often an attempt to place meaning on profound, but nevertheless natural biological experiences of the brain, termed "mystical experiences" by William James.
The general characteristics are reported as:
A profound sense of the breakdown of self which can lead to the feeling of "oneness" with all things, a shared identity or beginning
A profound sense of the loss of time, or shifting of time
The experience is transient, ineffable, noetic, passive[5]
These states have been induced in people without religious connotation by stimulating the brain with various levels of magnetic pulses. They can be induced by drugs, by dangerous or frightening experiences, by meditation, or spinning, but they all seem to come back to the same biological hard-wiring that is then interpreted through the glasses of the person's worldview.
This website discusses in depth how the religious experience is a sham, and here makes the case that it is caused by a “glitch” in the brain.
And I just love how belief shapes interpretation, and how inescapable that is. Even the most scientific minded person has biases and will be able to find proof of their ideas in what they observe.
Which is why I believe that the consequences of our beliefs are much more important than how easy it is to prove that belief...
but anyway, just to throw my own biased opinion on top of this, what if the human mind/body is a kind of filter, something which cuts us off from the natural state of oneness/nothingness... and that filter is necessary to act in 3D reality...
but beyond that exists a different perspective, and when parts of the brain are shut down, parts of that filter is shut down...
