Somebody has a vision. A light, a voice, a certainty that reorganises their life and eventually a fair amount of history. Centuries later a researcher reads the account and writes down a diagnosis.
Some researchers have even gone so far as to posthumously diagnose history's greatest mystics as victims of epileptic seizures. Some of these diagnoses suggest, for example, that Mohammed, who heard voices, saw visions, and sweated profusely during his mystical interludes, may have suffered from complex partial seizure. The same type of seizure may have been the source of the blinding light that struck St. Paul on the road to Damascus… Joan of Arc… may have suffered ecstatic partial seizures and perhaps an intracranial tuberculoma. Various epileptic states may also have been responsible for the visions of the Catholic mystic Saint Teresa of Avila, the conversion experience of Mormon patriarch Joseph Smith, the ecstatic trance states of Emanuel Swedenborg, even the hyper-religiosity of Vincent Van Gogh.1
Seven figures, three religions, six centuries, one neurological category. The response offered isn't a defence of the visions. It's that the diagnosis and the piety it replaces are the same mistake.
Every spiritual display of gong-fu becomes a pathology, or at the opposite end a "religious mystery" or "act of God" simply because people don't understand the scientific principles behind various spiritual phenomena.2
Two readings of an anomalous state, and they present themselves as enemies. One says: this is a seizure. The other says: this is God. They argue in public, each certain the other is the credulous party.
And they share a premise. Neither is looking for a mechanism. Seizure closes the question by filing the state under a disease. Act of God closes it by filing the state under a source you can't investigate. Both turn an unexplained thing into an explained-enough thing, and neither says how the state got produced or how anybody might produce it again.
The alternative is a mechanism, and it's stated without hedging:
if you want to know how the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament were able to perform their miracles I'll tell you: It was simply because they had cultivated samadhi attainments, and nothing else.2
Whatever you make of the claim, look at its shape. It's about method. It applies across traditions without favouring any of them. And it's the kind of thing that could in principle be checked, because a mechanism — unlike a disease or a divine act — predicts the state can be produced again.
The practical form is flatter still:
If you cultivate sufficiently you can perform these miracles and if you don't then you cannot. That's all there is to it. If you cannot perform them it is because your gong-fu is insufficient. It has nothing to do with God's will or grace or anything else that people use as excuses for why they themselves cannot perform such feats.3
On that reading the mystic is neither ill nor chosen. They're trained.
There's a doctrinal consequence attached that's easy to miss. Most traditions do recognise that some cultivators were greater than others — but without the full range of cultivation teachings they have no way to work out who was greater, so they end up twisting their own scriptures this way and that to produce doctrines that were never in them, including "proof" for the rankings.3 The ranking impulse survives the loss of the instrument that could satisfy it, and what fills the gap is interpretation.
A motive gets assigned for the preference, and it's the most cynical line in the passage:
In fact, people don't want to understand because they want to turn responsibilities over to a higher power other than themselves.2
The consequence of a mechanism is homework. If the prophets' capacities came from cultivation, then they're available, and not having them is a fact about what you've done.
Act of God removes that. And so, less obviously, does complex partial seizure — because a capacity that requires a lesion is no more actionable than one that requires election. Both readings return the same practical verdict: nothing for you to do. The neurologist and the pious reader disagree about everything except the part that matters to whoever is listening.
Whether the motive is real is a separate question, and nothing is offered for it beyond the assertion. The structure holds without it.
There's a fourth possibility on the same page and it gets one sentence, which is a shame, because it's the one a practitioner actually needs. Of everyone in the world with substantial-looking cultivation attainments, most are only halfway to the first dhyāna — or they've made a mistaken entry into the du-yin shadow consciousness, the flip side of the sixth consciousness of discrimination.4 The sixth is the sorting mind, the part that takes what the senses deliver and puts a name on it. It has a lit side and a shadowed one, and the shadowed side is the half that generates images with no sensory input at all: dreams, visions, the country you go to when the eyes are shut.
That's said to be what we usually find. And the reason people get it wrong is stated precisely: it's easy to produce psychic powers in that state, so the powers get read as evidence of a definite attainment.4
Put that beside the two errors above and you have a genuinely different diagnosis. Not a seizure, not a visitation, not an attainment. A wrong turn into the shadowed half of an ordinary faculty — which produces striking results, feels like arrival, and is neither pathology nor progress.
It's also the reading that hurts most, because it doesn't let the practitioner off. Illness isn't your fault and grace isn't your doing, but a wrong turn is a wrong turn, and the material says it's the common case.
The obvious reply to all of this is: fine, so measure it. The equipment exists — photography, Doppler blood-flow measurement, fMRI, respiratory recorders, SPECT imaging, blood analysis, hormone assays.5
But who can you apply them to?5
That's the problem, and it's a supply problem rather than a method problem. Scientists want to study advanced students or well-known yogis, and advanced students aren't close to first-dhyāna attainment while the yogic masters reach their special states through forced gong-fu rather than through real dhyāna.5 Put every master from every school in one room and the count of genuine attainments comes out in the dozens — the arithmetic belongs to the census page in this cluster and isn't repeated here.
Which produces the image the passage settles on:
a scientist has as much chance of encountering someone with Tao as an ocean turtle has in randomly popping to the surface of the water with its head coincidentally sticking through a hole in a piece of floating wood.5
And then, unexpectedly, a piece of practical advice rather than a shrug. The studies must be done, and researchers should prepare everything ahead of time — like a team on nuclear alert, ready to move the moment an opportunity turns up, because those opportunities don't last long.5 The instruments, the protocol and the ethics have to be sitting ready before the subject appears, since there'll be no time to build them afterwards.
Then the line that closes the whole thing off: I know the individuals who can demonstrate these states, but it's up to someone else to organize the investigational efforts.5
Take one detail out of the diagnostic list and follow it. Mohammed sweated profusely during his mystical interludes, and that sweating appears in the case for complex partial seizure.1 Autonomic disturbance is a real feature of seizures, so as a piece of clinical reasoning it isn't silly.
Now read the same datum in the other literature. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika gives a three-stage progression, and the first stage is perspiration: at the first stage perspiration breaks out, at the second the body trembles, and at the third prana reaches the centre of the head.6 Sweating isn't an incidental there. It's the entry marker.
So one man is sweating, and two bodies of writing have a category ready for it. One files it under autonomic disturbance and reads back to a lesion. The other files it under the first sign of a chi process and reads forward to trembling and then to the head. Neither category was derived from him. Both were brought.
And there's a test that separates them, which is why this is the useful case rather than a stalemate. The seizure reading predicts the sweating is uncontrolled, unpredictable, and unrelated to what the person was doing beforehand. The cultivation reading predicts it's the first term of a sequence — that trembling should follow, that the sequence should recur under the same conditions, and that it should be reproducible in somebody else who does the same practice.
Those come apart on evidence anybody could collect from a living practitioner. Which makes the retrospective diagnosis of Mohammed the least informative version of a question that has a perfectly good live version.
Next time you meet an account of an extraordinary state — historical, or from somebody you know — notice which move you make, and how fast. Most people have a default. Some reach for what was wrong with them, others for something happened here we can't explain. Both arrive in about a second, both feel like judgement rather than reflex, and both end the enquiry.
The third question takes longer and is the only one that goes anywhere: what was this person doing beforehand? Fasting? Short of sleep? Third week of a retreat? Under sustained stress? Practising something specific, and for how long? That doesn't settle whether the state was pathology or revelation, and it isn't meant to. It turns an interpretation problem into a conditions problem, which is the only version with any purchase on it.
Then the fourth question, which is the one the material adds and nobody else asks: could this be the shadow side of an ordinary faculty? Images arriving with the senses supplying nothing, striking results that come easily, a strong sense of significance — that's the du-yin description, and it's said to be the common case among people who look accomplished.4 It's not a reason to dismiss anything. It's a category that has to be on the list, because leaving it off is how the striking results get promoted.
And the honest check on your own reading. Ask what your interpretation would have to give up. If you concluded seizure, would you accept it if the same conditions reliably produced the same state in healthy people? If you concluded God, would you accept it if they did? An interpretation that survives every possible finding was never an interpretation.
Ranges read: pp. 360–362, with p. 408 checked in place for the perspiration sequence. Nothing here is claimed about material outside them. [POPULAR SOURCE].
🚩 The strongest exhibit doesn't say what it's quoted for. Read the Newberg passage for its verbs: some researchers have even gone so far as to… some of these diagnoses suggest… may have suffered… may also have been responsible for.1 Gone so far as is authors marking a position as an overreach and putting distance between themselves and it, and every diagnosis in the list is hedged twice. It's a report of a proposal by writers who visibly don't endorse it, taken from a book whose own argument is that religious experience is neurologically real rather than pathological. It's quoted as the exhibit for the charge that modern psychology catalogues almost any unusual spiritual state as a disorder,2 and it doesn't show that.
🚩 One claim is excluded from this page. The assertion that until 1994 the American Psychiatric Association classified "strong religious belief" as a mental disorder is given with no page, no diagnostic code and no quoted text — the whole citation is See the American Psychiatric Association DSM-IV 1994.7 The 1994 edition it points at is the one that introduced a dedicated non-pathological category for religious and spiritual problems, which is a change in the opposite direction. [CONTESTED], verification owed, and nothing here rests on it. Remove it and the institutional half of the thesis has nothing left standing under it.
🚩 And the objection is one the argument then commits. Reading textual accounts of the long-dead and assigning them a neurological condition is criticised, correctly — the subject can't be examined, the categories were built for living patients, and the inference runs from reported experience resembles a symptom to the person had the condition. Then the prophets' miracles happen simply because they had cultivated samadhi attainments, and nothing else.2 Same evidence base, same unavailable subject, same inference to an unobserved internal condition, and the same totalising scope. The difference in its favour is real but narrow: a claim that a state comes from a described practice is testable now, because the practice is available.
Open questions. The du-yin reading is offered as the common case among people who look accomplished.4 What distinguishes it from the real thing, from outside, in somebody living? And the nuclear-alert proposal is the one actionable suggestion in the passage — has any group ever actually built the standing protocol it describes?
Two things get demanded of the same evidence, and they pull apart. One wants the phenomena treated as science. Mechanisms, instruments, reproducibility, a protocol ready in advance, subjects who can demonstrate on request.5 That reading makes the states public property — anybody who does the work gets them, and anybody with an fMRI could in principle watch.
The other wants them treated as attainment. And attainment, on the same pages, is vanishingly rare, mostly unknown to the public because the people who have it want to cultivate in peace,5 and unrecognisable to anyone who hasn't got it themselves. That reading makes the states private by their nature.
Both are held at once, and the tension isn't decorative — it's the reason the proposed study can never be staffed. The criterion for a qualified subject is attainment, the people who have it are undisclosed, and the only person who claims to know who they are declines to organise the investigation.5
There's also a philosophical objection dropped in a single sentence and never developed: Western psychology ignores the very centre of human experience, the observing self, which is missing from its theories.7 Whatever its fairness as a description of a whole field, it names something real. An account of a state in terms of neural events describes what the state is made of; it doesn't describe the position from which the state is undergone. A seizure explanation of Paul's experience, even if correct, is an account of what happened in a brain rather than of what happened to Paul — and that gap isn't mysticism, it's the ordinary distance between a third-person description and a first-person one.
Read against The Census of Thirty, this page is the other half of that argument: the census says there's nobody to study, and this one says the categories waiting for them are wrong anyway. Against Du-Yin and the Psi Programmes, the shadow-consciousness reading is worked out at length there and used here as the missing fourth category. And Grace and Chosenness as Institutional Excuses is the same nothing for you to do verdict, arrived at from the devotional side.
History — The Double Anachronism. That page's mechanism is the historian's version of the same error: a modern category gets carried back into a period that had no such category, the evidence gets read as confirming it, and the second half of the anachronism is that the reader's own present is treated as the neutral vantage from which the past can be sorted.
Retrospective diagnosis is that operation with a clinical vocabulary. Complex partial seizure is a twentieth-century category applied to a seventh-century account, written by people with no interest in autonomic signs and preserved by people selecting for significance rather than for symptoms. The evidence was never collected as clinical evidence and it can't be re-collected.
What the pair produces is a rule sharper than either gives alone. The direction the anachronism runs tells you what it was for. Diagnose the dead as ill and you convert a founder into a patient, settling a modern argument about religion with a subject who can't answer back. Diagnose them as accomplished cultivators and you convert them into practitioners, settling a different modern argument with the same unavailable subject. Neither is doing history. Both are doing present-day work with borrowed dead people, and the tell in both cases is identical: the category gets applied where nobody can check it and withheld from the living cases where somebody could.
Which points at the same fix in both fields. Run the claim on somebody who is here. The perspiration sequence, the du-yin markers and the conditions test are all checkable on a living practitioner this year. Nothing about Mohammed's sweating is.
One handshake. A second, on the institutional uses of nothing for you to do, is carried by the grace-and-chosenness page already linked and would restate rather than extend.
Sharpest implication. The seizure reading and the act-of-God reading hand the listener the same instruction, which is none — and that shared consequence matters more to a practitioner than everything the two sides disagree about. The only reading with anything attached is the one that says the state came from a method, because a method is the one explanation that puts the question back in your hands.
Generative questions.