Seizure or Revelation?

[Jim and His Karma]

Below is an instant message session with a friend. As background, the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe_epilepsy
are 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....

[VIL]

Great post, Jim.  I really enjoyed the conversation and your level headiness.  This is something that I discussed also, some time back:

http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/index.php?topic=3357&whichpage=2#29404



VIL

[hopeless meditator]

I have recently tried to discuss this with someone who researches epilepsy, because I have been experiencing quite frightening seizure-like episodes infrequently at night. The answer that I got is that you would definitely know if you had epilepsy, as the post-ictal phase would alert you to this. Sadly, I do not really understand what a "post-ictal phase" is!

I recently blundered across an interesting paper by Ricard and colleagues (2004) entitled: Long-Term Meditators Self Induce High Amplitude Gamma Synchrony During Mental Practice.

Please Google, if interested. The authors conclude that such brainwave activity in monks who practice consistently is the highest found in a non-pathological context.

It is interesting to note, however, that Karen Armstrong - who is an ex-Nun - and writes extensively on mystical subjects, suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy for many years before this was discovered. Her autobiography (2nd draft, not the first) speaks very honestly about this.

[Jim and His Karma]

I guess by definition, yogic awakening is "abnormal". As such, we'd have to expect any medical basis to speak of it in terms of impairment.

[AYPforum]

Moderator note: Topic moved for better placement

[david_obsidian]

I missed this thread a while back.  I suppose moving threads has the benefit of re-awakening them!

Whe Science penetrates these matters,  I think all will prove somehwat more complex than we expected, and there will be some things found out that no-one expected.  (Perhaps there are two general laws here:  as science illuminates things, (i) we always find out that our earlier views were considerably over-simplified and (ii) we find out some things that no-one, at all, genuinely expected. )

While temporal-lobe epilepsy and yogic-phenomena way well indeed related,  I'd very much have my doubts if they are exactly the same thing.  I believe the nervous system will prove to have a number of phenomena which are partly seizure-like.  I even personally theorize that certain phases of sleep will prove to be seizure-like when we penetrate further, and the same with samadhi, the blissful thoughtless state we can experience in meditation.   Not all seizure-like phenomena will prove to be over-powering and convulsive.  Some of  them will prove to be natural self-normalizing phenomena of the nervous sysem.

Another interesting angle is that seizures/convulsions, can have a remarkably positive effect on depression.  This is true even if the seizures are considered pathological (such as epileptic seizures) and even if the seizures are forced: and indeed we have electro-convulsive therapy,  a form of forced seizure, which is one of the most generally-effective treatments for depression (sadly, its side-effects, which include profound memory loss,  are so strong that it is only used as a last resort).  As time goes on, I believe medical science may figure out how to induce localized or mild convulsions that help with depression without such negative side-effects.  The samadhi-machine!