Below is an instant message session with a friend. As background, the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe_epilepsyare remarkably similar to the symptoms of kundalini and other yogic openings.
---Friend: I've been watching a series about mormonism. I have a theory!
---Friend: Joseoph Smith who wrote the book of mormon had "revelations" as he called them. Each started with a bright light, and then the "truth" was revealed
---Friend: I think he had temporal lobe epilepsy.
---Friend: The light was an aura. Happened with saints too.
---Friend: Sainthood is a medical condition
---Me: Calling it temporal lobe epilepsy is just another thing to call it.
---Me: It's just a name affixed to certain symptoms
---Me: There are words to define, biochemically, happiness. So you can say "I"m happy" but I can reply "No you're not, you're just peaking in these certain hormones and endorphins"
---Me: There's no contradiction either way. They're just different ways to describe an experience. Noting a physical basis for an experience does not devalue the experience.
---Friend: So the true believers would think it's fine that Smith started a whole religion based on epileptic symptoms?
---Me: would I tell you you're wrong to say you're "happy" when you just have a slightly different flow of hormones and endorphins?
---Me: An idea has biochemical basis. A feeling has biochemical basis. Everything we think and do can be traced to material flows and processes. Naming the thoughts and feelings and whatnot in scientific jargon is fine and useful for science but it doesn't mean they're not ideas or feelings. It's just labeling.
---Me: If you tell me you just had a bright idea and I say, no, that's ONLY "dithrimalymyde working off the third receptor", you'd rightfully say I may be correct, but that in no way contraverts the fact that you had a bright idea. In fact, it sort of PROVES the fact that you had a bright idea by showing that there was actually a physiological basis, rather than just your subjective impression
---Me: Some of my yoga openings, if measured via cat scan, would surely have appeared like temporal lobe epilepsy. Thank heaven for science! Fifty years ago, I'd have been deemed hysterical or worse. We're getting closer now....scientists can see that "something's happening", even if they don't understand what that thing is.
---Friend: Of course what you say is true. But the mormon followers say that nothing can explain Smith's revelatory experience except that god came down, appeared to him, and spoke to him.
---Me: nearly all the good things that have happened to the human race...the brilliant flashes, the bursts of art and creativity, the understandings that seemed to come from out of nowhere, came as sudden 'eureka' moments. You want to call 'em seizures, I'm ok with that. I don't think that's in any way incompatible with "revelation". That something is a seizure doesn't make it "just" a seizure, any more than a delicious glass of lemonade is "just" hydration.
--Friend: I think when you have hundreds of thousands of people following someone on the basis of something like a seizure, that's different from admiring Van Gogh's hallucination on canvas.
Me: How about einstein's theory of relativity? Came to him all at once. no build-up. just flashed into his brain. I'd bet if he was on a CAT scan, it'd have looked crazy. So....shall we dismiss it?
Me: or to ask another way.....what CAT scan result do YOU need to see in order to respect the thought expressed?
Friend: I don't know what it would look like, or if it would have registered....