Interesting. I read an article in Newsweek years ago about the budding field of neurotheology. Scientists apparently located the part of the brain that establishes the boundary between perception of Self and Other. Mystics learn how to voluntarily switch off this region, leading to the feeling of being One With Everything.

IIRC, there were two lives, intimately remembered in full detail -- the details became less accessible the older he got.

Wow. Synchronicity. I told a hot dog vendor just last week, "Make me One with Everything."

Enlightenment with mustard and relish!

Seriously, that's kind of the generic bottommost level of mystical experience.

Most of which can be shown to have organic, biological roots. If you get whacked on the head and see stars, it's not because you're astrally projecting.

Well, yeah. I think the organic roots bit is contributing factor rather than cause for the basic mystical experience. The brain's organization of data seems to be more directly contributory.

So far as I can tell, if you wanted to give a more-or-less materialist (though not Victorian positivist materialist) explanation, it's the sensed experience of the non-verbal part of the brain looking at the structures used by all parts of the brain (incuding the verbal parts which is normally all we listen to).

That old brain does not use fine discrimination but instead sees things in terms of wholes, completeness, friendly-unfriendly, and so forth -- global rather than fine-grained. Since what it is looking at is the total system of scripts and models we use to organize our sense of the world (our "mental model"), it's not surprising that it sees everything related to everything else, and it's equally not surprising that it senses an overall intelligence in that world-picture.

Or as a friend and I have taken to remarking of someone we all know, he's been sniffing the glue of his mental model . . .

And when you gave him a $5 bill and waited for your change, he just said, "Change must come from within."

And Jim can then tell him, "No, no, I want t' change." [cf. the punch line to to the joke, how many talk therapists does it take to change a lightbulb -- only one but the light bulb has to want to change.]

Dang, that may be the most concise description of fandom ever written. Heinlein nailed it.

So how can we agree to that without labeling ourselves? Surely we cannot hide behind "present company excepted...."